"Hey."
Came a voice out of the twilight, low and mocking, as the boy passed light-footed through the streets. He heard. He was meant to. He did not pause.
"Hey. Kerr-i-gan."
He gritted his teeth and went on, faster. Damned if they could make him look.
A shadow detached itself from the larger shadow of a building, and planted itself so suddenly and solidly in his path that Kerrigan perforce skidded to a halt. "Gods damn it--"
Becky's Jack grinned at him. "Where you goin' s'fast?"
"Get out my way."
"Goin' home t'mama?"
Snickers out of the dark.
"Get out my way, I said. Dammit--" He sidestepped, found himself blocked. "Damn it all to 'ell."
They did this on occasion. Four or five occasions a week, generally. They did it because he hated it, and because there were -- however bloody many there were -- of them and only one of him, and they could. It did not matter how he took it.
"Aw," said Becky's Jack. "Now he's mad."
Kerrigan glared at him. "Get out my way. I got better things t'do 'n stand here watchin' you snigger c's you think y're smart."
"C's I think I am?"
"Anyone else ever told you y'was?"
More snickers. It was possible he was gaining ground. Or playing into their hands; he could never tell. He braced his feet, hands in his pockets, studiedly casual, and regarded them with all the mockery he could muster. "C'mon now. You get out my way an' go back t'scarin' crows or whatever the 'ell it is you do t'make y'self useful--"
"Or what?"
"Let you think about 'at one," said Kerrigan coolly.
A hoot from behind him. "Witch's bastard gonna hex y'inta nex' week, Jack, ain't you skeered?"
Kerrigan turned, deliberately, to face the speaker, a redheaded lout grinning gap-toothed at his own wit, and fixed him with an icy look. "Want t'try me?"
The grin went hard and hollow. Gods, thought Kerrigan bleakly, he believes it.
He did not let his expression change. "Didn't think so." As measuredly as before he swung back around to face Becky's Jack, whose smirk had turned into a glower. He studied him a moment. Then, quietly, "Get out my way."
Jack spat to the side, and got out of his way.
He half expected some missile, or at least parting insult, to fly at his back as he walked away; but there was only the deadly silence.
Night had fallen when at last he reached home. There was no light from the single window, but that was usual; if he was not home by dark, Enid was perfectly content to sit in the shadows, dreaming her incomprehensible dreams. He sighed, ducking through the low doorway.
"Mother, I swear, you could light a candle without half tryin'--"
Silence. He glanced around the room.
"Mother?"
She had fallen asleep. Curled up on his cot, rather than her own behind the tattered curtain; not that she'd know the difference when one of her spells was on her. Her pale hair gleamed in the faint light from the street. He sighed again, loudly, going to light the candle himself.
"You can't sleep all day, Mother, damn it, you'll be up all night. I keep tellin' you 'n' you never damn listen..."
He expected her to rebuke him for cursing; it was one of her few reliable habits. But she made no sound, not even a drowsy sigh; and he set the candle down and turned, frowning.
"Mother?" It was not like her to sleep so soundly. "Mama, dammit--" He leaned down to shake her by the shoulder, not gently. Her head fell back slightly, unresisting; and then he knew.
"O gods." He could not, somehow, breathe. He jerked his hand back, staring at her. So small. So frail. So vulnerable. And he had not been with her. "O gods, mama..."
He felt very young suddenly. His fourteen years had seemed world-weary ages three minutes ago; now they seemed nothing at all. His first impulse was to curl up on the floor and wail.
No. Do something. Do anything.
"I'll be back," he promised the still face, the pallid hair. And bolted out the door.
It was less than five minutes, at his desperate sprint, to Old Emma's house on Gull Street, but it felt like a century before her red-painted door reared out of the gloom before him. Kerrigan pounded on it once, twice, three times.
"What's the matter?" demanded a reedy voice in vexation.
"Gods of hell, Auntie--" His voice cracked, then broke. He kicked the door. "Open this--"
It swung open, abruptly, so that he had to catch himself on the doorframe. Emma's beady black eyes squinted up at him.
"Is 'at me grandnephew makin' such a racket?"
"Yeah. It's me. Auntie, she-- Mama--"
"What?" she snapped.
"She--" Damn it all, he was going to cry, here in the street. He took a deep, shaking breath. "Auntie, you got to come. You got to."
"All right, all right. Let me get me bag."
"You don' need y'damn bag!"
Old Emma blinked at him. Then, incredibly, her wrinkled face lost its wily hardness. "Is 'at the way of it?" she murmured, bemused.
He nodded mutely, gritting his teeth.
She sighed. "Ahhh, boy."
"You got to come," he repeated hoarsely.
"All right. All right." She tucked her shawl close about her and shuffled out. Kerrigan followed her in numb silence, through the darkened streets back to the tiny, silent house.
In the doorway she paused for a moment before padding inside. "You light the candle, boy?"
"Yeah."
Emma stood still, regarding her niece in seeming bafflement. "What happened?"
"I dunno." He was trembling. He braced himself on the back of the chair. "I j's' came home... I thought..."
To his dull amazement Old Emma reached out and patted his arm. Emma, who had had nothing but cuffs for him since he could remember.
"Auntie--"
"Eh?"
"Auntie, I swear-- she was all right 'is mornin'. I--"
She patted him again, and knelt creakily beside the cot. Kerrigan watched blankly, leaning on the chair, as she muttered to herself, studied the pale face, the thin hands. All at once she sniffed, cautiously, and wrinkled her nose. "Boy."
"Yeah."
"You keep winterthorn 'round here?" Her tone was faintly accusatory. He blinked.
"You give 'er it y'self last spring f'the cough..."
"Reeks of it," Emma pronounced.
He had thought his heart could not sink any further. "O gods. O gods, no, she wouldn't..."
And for the third time Emma startled him, peering up at him in what looked like remorse. "Eh, I don't say she did, lad. Likely she thought she were makin' 'erself a cup o' tea."
It was so exactly, macabrely what Enid would do that he had to laugh; and hated himself immediately. "O gods, mama..." The tears spilled over, finally.
Old Emma came and took him in her spindly arms, a hard strong unsentimental embrace, as all about her was hard and strong and unsentimental, and held him so while he cried into her thin grey hair; and then she went to call the neighbors to carry Mad Enid away.
They buried her the next morning, sealing her in stone in the sea caves as the custom was in that steep and thin-soiled place; and they left scented candles burning for the Great Goddess, and for the gods of earth and sea, and for St. Alison the patron of their town, and for St. Kyle who protects the mad. There were few mourners, only Old Emma and Young Emma her daughter, forty if a day, and Young Emma's children Rill and Grace, who watched Enid's son throughout the rite with mingled sympathy and wary curiosity, as though wondering if he too was mad.
Kerrigan thought that he might be. The world seemed unnaturally clear around him, and faintly skewed. Once Grace made so bold as to pat him on the shoulder; he hardly felt it. He hardly felt anything, except a drained weariness.
He lingered in the caves a long while after the rest of them had gone home, Old Emma with a fatalistic grumble, Young Emma with a too-hearty assurance that her door was always open to him, Grace and Rill with skittish looks that made him vow silently never to cross that threshold. Better to freeze.
Look after myself, he thought sullenly, a'ways have-- but there was no comfort in the thought. He stood in the still, silent cavern, watching the candles burn down slowly, and thought he could see his mother's vague, bewildered soul in the wavering smoke.
It was midday when at last he emerged, blinking, into the brilliant sunlight. The spangled sea, far below, half blinded him with its glare. He stood dazzled a moment, then turned and made his way up the steep path back into town. The too-vivid streets, bustling so ordinarily in the too-bright summer light, oppressed him; but he did not know where else to go.
So he wandered, blindly, thinking determinedly of nothing, and did not notice where his feet took him until a soft "Hey," brought him up short.
The same street. The same corner.
And Becky's Jack lounging against a signpost.
With an inarticulate cry of outrage Kerrigan hurled himself at him, and boys and sign went down in a tangle of limbs and splinters. "Gods," spluttered Becky's Jack in what breath he could gather with Kerrigan flailing at him, making up in furious force what he lacked in accuracy.
As the shopkeeper whose sign it had been came rushing out, demanding what in Alison's name?
"'ell if I know!" Jack gasped as the man hauled Kerrigan bodily off him.
"Le' me go! Gods dammit-- I'll kill 'im--"
"You shut it," said the shopkeeper roughly, and then: "What happened?"
"J's' jumped me," spat Becky's Jack, clambering to his feet, "'e's crazy like 'is mother, I dunno--"
"My mother's dead!" Kerrigan flung at him, in tears, "she died las' night while I was standin' right here c's you wouldn't let me the 'ell alone!" I could've been there, I could've done somethin', I could've told 'er-- He wrenched against the shopkeeper's grasp, but the man was built like a bear and held fast.
Becky's Jack had not moved, or spoken. He looked, incredibly, abashed.
"I din't know," he muttered, finally, to the cobblestones rather than to Kerrigan.
"Yeah," said Kerrigan bitterly, "neither'd I."
The shopkeeper loosed him. He jerked away, standing apart from both of them, tense and shaking. Useless to rail at Becky's Jack any further. Useless to do anything. The too-clear world blurred around him.
"J's' let me alone," he said, biting the words off before they could quaver, and turned away.
"Here," said the shopkeeper, apologetically, but firmly, "what about my sign?"
Gods dammit-- He turned back, jaw clenched against hysteria, only to see Jack, with something like a scandalized look, step between them.
"I'll pick it up," said Becky's Jack, tormentor of his days, "sir. 's my fault any'ow."
He had not known there was honor in Jack. Much less pity.
"I c'n--"
"Said I'll do it," Jack said without turning around.
"Go on home, boy," the shopkeeper told Kerrigan sternly; and Kerrigan, dazed, turned once again in silence and left them there.
He did not go home. He wandered again instead, slipping through familiar alleys, crossing and recrossing the same streets, aimless. Those townsfolk who knew him marked his passage and his looks with a certain foreboding: remember his mother. A few of the more kindly among them ventured a greeting; he did not hear them.
When night came he found himself, without any idea how he had gotten there, at his own door. He stared at it with loathing. But even the summer nights are brisk in Port St. Alison, and at last the bite in the air drove him inside.
It was terribly still. The shadows seemed darker than they had ever been before. He moved automatically toward his cot, then jerked back with a shudder, and finally fell to his knees beside Enid's instead, burying his face in the quilt.
O mama, mama. I'm sorry, mama. I'm sorry.
Please.
The bedclothes were soft and worn. They smelled faintly of pine and salt, as she had. Kneeling there, at last he fell asleep.
For the next several weeks he lived in a sort of daze. In the mornings he prowled the scrubby pine woods, the rocky beaches; places his mother, shy of people, had frequented. Afternoons he went up into the town again, seeking the small jobs a boy of fourteen could do to earn what few coppers it took to keep him alive. Such opportunities were not terribly many, in a year when even grown men had trouble finding work in Port St. Alison. Kerrigan, for whom, after that first sharp-edged day, the world had gone grey and dim and unreal, did not especially care.
Young Emma, who caught sight of him fairly often in these afternoons, watched as he grew ever thinner and more silent, his eyes ever harder, and her capricious conscience pricked her again. Things began to appear without explanation in the tiny house: bread, dried fruit, candles, and as autumn came on, a slightly ravelled blue sweater.
If Kerrigan ever noticed these phenomena, he gave no sign; certainly she never saw him wear the sweater. But one afternoon she turned from setting her basket down on the chair, and found him in the doorway watching.
"You don' have to do 'at," he said quite gently.
"I know I don't," Young Emma retorted. "Mebbe I want to, eh?"
"I c'n manage."
"You're fourteen, boy. You shouldn't 'ave to. Times is 'ard."
"I know 'at." The young face was weary. "You got enough t'worry about, Emma."
"Oh, hush it, boy." Young Emma was not a woman noted for her patience, and this exhausted it. She flapped both hands at him. "If my Rill were in yer place I'd want to know summun were 'elpin' 'im out a bit, in times like these."
"I can't make it up t'you--"
"I ain't asking you. An' if you could, I wouldn' let you, so none o' yer nonsense."
He sighed, acquiescing, and leaned against the doorjamb.
"Besides," she added awkwardly, after a pause, "I was fond o' yer mother."
Kerrigan gave her a bleakly sardonic glance, and said nothing.
"You may not b'lieve me," said Emma hardily, "but it's the truth, so it is, an' I'll not let any child o' hers go cold of a winter."
He shrugged, indifferently. "Have done afore."
"Contrary young devil, ain't you?"
"Yeah."
Oddly enough, that made her chuckle. "Ah, you've no business bein' too big t'spank, you. Have it your way then. But wear that sweater, 'ear?"
He grinned faintly. "I do. Nights." And then, what few people had heard unsolicited from Kerrigan, "Thanks, Emma."
"The sauce of 'im," said Young Emma, regaining her gruffness with her composure. "Out o' me way, I've things to do."
Kerrigan managed another half grin, and stepped aside, letting her pass. He watched her bustle away up the street, a homely drab figure in the autumnal sunshine, and he felt his throat tighten.