Book One: The Unseelie Fight Club

A Warning Reader, before you turn the page: There are towers in this country that were built on blood, and some of them remember. If you shelter in a ruin and hear iron boots on the stair, do not wait to see who wears them. Do not fight him. You cannot win, and he would like you to try. What you are holding is a story. Probably. Speak the oath. Then read on. The Oath of Protection By rowan-tree and red thread, Make the witches tyne their speed. I'll not bleed for the Redcap's hat, I'll not fight where the iron boots clatter. If he comes to the door of my reading, I'll say the words my Gran gave me: Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night. Good Neighbours, I mean you no harm. Pass me by. The boiler started knocking at ten past six, the way it always did, and Kelvin Armstrong lay in the dark and counted the knocks the way he always had. One. Two. Three. A pause, long enough to hope. Then four. It was the last morning he would hear it. That should have felt like something. Mostly it felt like the boiler needed a man out, and there was no money for a man out, and he was leaving anyway. He got up before he could think about it any more. Downstairs, Gran was already in the kitchen with the big light off and the wee lamp on, because the big light cost money and the wee lamp was "plenty for folk with eyes in their heads." She was standing at the cooker in her dressing gown and her good cardigan over the top, stirring porridge that didn't need stirring. "You're up," she said, without turning round. "The boiler's up." "Aye, well. It's saying cheerio." She banged the spoon on the side of the pot. "Sit." He sat. The kitchen in Douglas Square was small enough that he could have reached the kettle from the table if he'd leaned, and he'd spent eighteen years leaning. The window over the sink looked out onto the back green and the hills behind, black against a sky that hadn't decided yet. In a minute the first car would go past on the way to Hawick. In an hour, he'd be on the bus behind it. Gran put a bowl in front of him and a spoon beside it and then, after a moment, a mug of tea with the sugar already in, two, which was one more than she approved of. "Special occasion," she said. "I'm only going to Stirling, Gran." "You're going past Stirling. You said." "Just past." "Past is past." She sat down across from him with her own tea and watched him eat as if she were trying to memorise the shape of it. Euphemia Armstrong was seventy-four and five foot nothing in her slippers. She had a face like a hazelnut and hands that had done everything — lambing, laundry, three years at the Co-op till, a fortnight with her arm in a sling after she'd fallen off the shed roof putting the felt back on herself because nobody else was going to. She'd raised him since he was four. She had never once, in all that time, let him see her cry, and he could tell from the set of her mouth that she didn't intend to start this morning. "Now," she said, when he'd scraped the bowl. "Two things." She reached into the cardigan pocket and brought out a small thing wrapped in a square of kitchen roll. She put it on the table between them and unwrapped it the way you would a bird's egg. It was a cross. Not a church cross — two twigs, no longer than his little finger, laid across each other with the arms equal, and bound at the middle with red thread wound round and round and tied off in a hard wee knot. The bark was smooth and grey. He knew it before she said. "Rowan," Gran said. "From the tree at the bottom of the green. I cut them on the right day and I said the right words, so don't you be making a face." "I'm not making a face." "You're making a face inside." She pushed it towards him. "Rowan-tree and red thread. You ken the rest." He did. He'd known it before he knew his times tables. Make the witches tyne their speed. She had sung it at him in the bath. She had hung crosses like this one above the back door and the front door and the door of his bedroom, and every May she took them down and burned them and made new ones, and when he was eleven and embarrassed he had asked her to stop and she had looked at him with such flat astonishment that he never asked again. "In your pocket," she said. "Not your bag. Your pocket. Bags get stolen." "Who's going to steal two twigs?" "You'd be surprised what gets stolen." She folded her hands. "Second thing." This one was a card — an old postcard of Hermitage Castle, the colours gone soft and orange the way photos went in the seventies, the great grey walls standing up out of the grass like something that had been dropped there from a height. He'd seen it on the mantelpiece his whole life. She turned it over. On the back, in her careful joined-up hand that leaned into a wind nobody else could feel, she had written one line. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night. "Psalm ninety-one," Gran said. "Verse five. Your great-grandfather carried that through the war and he came home, which is more than can be said for most." "Gran —" "You don't have to believe a word of it. You just have to have it." She tapped the card once with her finger. "Wallet. Behind your bank card. Where you'll find it." He put it in his wallet behind his bank card. He put the rowan cross in the front pocket of his jeans, where it pressed a small hard shape against his leg. She watched him do both, and when he'd done it, something in her shoulders let go. "Right," she said, and stood up and took his bowl. "That's that." The bus to Hawick came at twenty to eight, and Gran stood at the stop with him in her coat and her good shoes and didn't say anything at all, which was worse than anything she could have said. When the bus pulled in she reached up and took his face in both her hands, cold and dry as paper. "Mind the old rules," she said. "I'll mind them." "Say them." "Gran, there's folk waiting." "Then be quick." He glanced at the driver, who was looking carefully at his own wing mirror. "Don't take what's offered in the dark," Kelvin said, low. "Don't give your name to anything that asks twice. Don't shelter in a ruin. And if you hear boots on the stair —" "—you don't wait to see who's wearing them," Gran finished. She let go of his face. "Good lad. Phone me Sunday." "I'll phone you tonight." "Phone me Sunday. Calls cost money." She stepped back. "Go on." He got on. He sat on the left so he could see her, and she stood at the stop with her handbag over her arm and didn't wave, because waving was for folk who weren't sure you'd come back. The bus pulled out past the Grapes and the war memorial and the long straight street of grey houses all the same height, and she got smaller and smaller and then the road bent and the Liddel Water slid in beside it, brown and fast, and she was gone. Kelvin put his hand in his pocket and closed it round the rowan cross until the twigs dug into his palm. It was a long way north, and somewhere around Selkirk he fell asleep against the window and dreamed of Hermitage. It wasn't a dream, exactly. It was a memory with the edges worn off. He was nine. It was September, and wet, the way it was always wet in Liddesdale in September, the rain coming sideways off the hills so that you were soaked on one side and dry on the other. Gran had taken him on the bus and then walked him the last two miles along the road because she said a place like that ought to be come at on foot. He remembered the castle rising up out of the flat green ground by the Hermitage Water, bigger than he had expected and blinder, its walls almost without windows, like a face with its eyes shut. He remembered the great arch cut through the end wall, so tall that it seemed to be holding up the sky.