‘Tch! You’d get more sense out of an animal,’ said another woman. ‘It’s useless, if you ask me — meaning no offence to you, Teasel,’ she added as Keeve’s mother bristled. ‘Of course we all want to see your lad safe home again. Only that I can’t see how that nasty creature down below is going to help us find him.’
‘Well,’ said Teasel, pinching the yarn tight between finger and thumb, ‘if the creature won’t give me back my son, then at least we can make him pay for it. That’s what I say, and Hew’s of the same mind. My man killed a spriggan all by himself once, you know. Stove its head in with his thunder-axe, and kicked its carcass into the sea.’
The other women exclaimed and sat up, eager for details, but Cicely edged closer to Ivy. ‘I don’t like it when people talk about killing,’ she whispered.
‘It’s a spriggan,’ Ivy replied, not looking up from the wool she was carding. ‘And if he won’t tell what he did with Keeve, then he deserves it.’
Yet later that evening, after she’d tucked Cicely into bed, Ivy found herself wondering why the spriggan wasn’t talking. Perhaps he was afraid of being executed for his crimes, but he must realise that he was never going to get out of the Delve anyway…
Make him pay for it, murmured Teasel in her memory, and then with grim relish, My man killed a spriggan all by himself once.
But that had been thirty years ago, according to Nettle. If the spriggans had managed to elude the hunters of the Delve for so long, how had her brother and Mattock caught this one so easily? Especially if he’d killed Keeve and eaten him right down to the bones, as no one was saying but everybody feared. Surely after committing such a horrible murder, he’d want to put as much distance between himself and the Delve as he could?
‘How am I supposed to know what goes on in a spriggan’s head?’ asked Mica irritably, when Ivy asked him. By that time Cicely was sound asleep, so they could talk freely. ‘Ask the Joan, if she can get him talking before he starves to death.’ He poured himself a tankard of small beer and sat down at the table. ‘Anyway, why should you care? I thought you’d be happy to see him caught. Revenge for our mother, and all that.’
‘And all that?’ Ivy repeated in disbelief. ‘You caught a spriggan with your own hands! How can you talk as though-’ She dropped onto the bench across from Mica. ‘You can’t still think our mother left us on purpose.’
‘Why not?’ he snapped, then flinched as Cicely mumbled and turned over. ‘All I’m saying,’ he went on more quietly, ‘is that nobody knows what happened that night. And I don’t see how you can keep on about spriggans, when you of all people should know-’ He broke off and pushed back from the table, his lip curling. ‘Oh, what’s the point? You never listen to me anyway.’
‘I’m listening now,’ said Ivy, making an effort at patience. Maybe Mica had forgotten the tenderness in Marigold’s face as she kissed her children good night, or her radiant smile as she danced to the music of Flint’s fiddle. Maybe he truly thought there was some reason their mother would have wanted to leave. ‘Go on. What is it I’m supposed to know?’
‘About the fight, of course.’
‘What fight?’
‘Between Dad and Mum, the night before she disappeared.’ He glanced at the archway to their father’s bedchamber — the only separate room in the cavern. ‘They were in there with the door closed, so there’s no telling how it started. But once they got going you could hear nearly every word. Don’t you remember?’
Her parents, fighting? It seemed impossible — Flint had always doted on Marigold, and neither of them were the quarrelling sort. Ivy was tempted to suggest it had just been a nightmare, but the look on Mica’s face forestalled her. She shook her head. ‘You’re going to have to remind me. What were they fighting about?’
‘She said she was leaving, and she wanted to take you and Cicely with her.’ His voice wavered on the last phrase, and he made a face at his tankard. ‘Dad was furious. He said he couldn’t stop her throwing away her life, but she wasn’t taking his children anywhere. Then she started to cry and I couldn’t make out what she was saying any more, and he didn’t say anything at all. And when she came out of the chamber she was still crying, but quietly, like she didn’t want any of us to know. So I pretended I was asleep.’
Ivy’s stomach felt heavy, as though she had swallowed a stone. ‘I don’t remember any of that,’ she said.
‘Well, you should. Because you sat up and asked her what was the matter. And then she climbed into your alcove and shut the curtains, and the two of you were whispering in there for ages.’ He ran a finger around the rim of his cup. ‘So you knew she was going away, like I did. You just couldn’t bear to face the truth, so you…’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, blocked it out somehow. Made yourself believe it was the spriggans who took her instead.’
‘I didn’t make myself do anything!’ Ivy knotted her fists in her lap, so furious she felt sick. ‘What makes you think your memory is any better than mine? Maybe it was you who couldn’t bear to think that our mother was taken by the spriggans, so you invented this story and talked yourself into believing it! You think she bled all over her shawl on purpose, then left it on a gorse-bush for Dad to find so she could…do what? Go dancing with the faeries?’
Mica hunched his shoulders. ‘I don’t know why she wanted to leave,’ he said. ‘And I don’t know what happened to her either. Maybe the spriggans did get her in the end. But I’m not going to waste my life brooding over someone who-’
‘Don’t you dare,’ warned Ivy. ‘If you want to tell yourself that Mum was selfish and uncaring and that we’re well rid of her, then I can’t stop you. But I remember what she was really like, and I will never believe that. Never.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mica muttered into his beer. ‘Either way she’s gone, and she isn’t coming back. Believe whatever makes you happy.’
And all at once Ivy thought she understood. ‘Is that why you never said anything to me about it?’ she said more softly. ‘Because you thought I was happier not knowing?’
‘No,’ said Mica. ‘I never said anything because I knew you’d be like this.’ He drained his tankard, shoved it towards her, and marched off to bed.
Ivy sat unmoving, staring into the foamy dregs. She felt numb and a little dizzy, as though she’d cut herself by accident and was just beginning to feel it. Could she really have forgotten something so enormous, so shattering? Even if she had, shouldn’t she be able to remember it now?
Yet when she forced her mind back to that evening five years ago, she found only a blank fuzzy space — nothing to confirm or deny anything Mica had said. Could she really have been so weak, so desperate, as to erase her own memories? She’d never heard of anyone doing such a thing, but maybe…
No. She wasn’t going to blame herself, or her mother, until she could be certain that Mica’s story was true. Which meant she’d have to wait until her father came home, and ask him.
Or better yet, she could go find him herself, and settle the question at once. After all, what was the worst Flint could do to her? Even a blow or a curse would be better than the silence she lived with every day.
Ivy pushed back her chair. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ she said. ‘Don’t wait up for me.’
By the time Ivy left the cavern, it was so late that most piskeys were in bed, and the others were on their way there. But Flint had given up regular hours a long time ago, so there was no telling where he might be.
Most likely he was working in the depths of the mine, but by now he’d tunnelled so far that Ivy hardly knew where to begin looking for him — a problem that became clear the instant she climbed down the ladder to the diggings. If the other knockers had been working, she could have asked one of them to point her in the right direction. But without being familiar with the labyrinth of tunnels that the piskey miners used, she could wander half the night before she heard the telltale crack and rumble of her father’s thunder-axe.
She called his name as loudly as she dared, but there was no answer. If her father had been any less capable, Ivy might have been worried about him. But Flint was a true knocker, able to sense every strength and weakness of the surrounding granite, and he never caused a rockfall unless he meant to. He was safe enough, and he’d come home when he was ready. But who knew how much longer that would be?
Frustrated, Ivy climbed up the ladder and shut the trap-door behind her. What was she going to do now? It was no use going home to bed in this state: she’d be tossing and turning for hours.
At last she decided to take a walk around the Delve. Perhaps she’d bump into her father, or at least hear him working, along the way — and even if she didn’t, at least it should make her tired enough to steal a few minutes’ rest before he came in.
Over the next hour Ivy made two long winding circuits of the tunnels, climbing every ramp and staircase she found. But by the time she’d finished she felt no closer to sleep than before.
There was only one place she could think of that she hadn’t visited already. Ivy walked the length of the adjoining tunnel and braced her hands on the iron railing at the edge of the Great Shaft, gazing up at the faint glimmer of moonlight high above. Should she climb to the top? The effort would certainly tire her out, but ‘ Bind up my wounds,’ rasped a voice from the darkness.
Ivy jumped back, clapping both hands over her mouth to stifle a cry. ‘Who’s there?’ she tried to ask, but her lips could barely form the words. The sound hadn’t come from the tunnel behind her — it was floating up from the depths of the shaft, from the old human workings where no piskey had reason to be.
‘ Soft! I did but dream. O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me! ’
Nobody in the Delve talked like that. Not even the oldest piskeys used such formal language, and the droll-teller himself had never spoken with such tortured passion. Ivy clutched the railing and leaned out over it, dreading what she might see. She’d never believed in ghosts, but…
‘ The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight. Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh… ’ Then the speaker faltered and began to moan, ‘Light! Light! ’ with increasing desperation, like a feverish child begging for water. It was the most pitiful thing Ivy had ever heard.
Might it be a human, who had wandered in through one of the old adits and got lost in the depths of the mine? Ivy would have been relieved to think so, for in that case it would be easy to play will-o’-the-wisp and lead him up to the surface again. But in her heart she knew better. The words might be strange and garbled, but the voice was all too familiar.
It was the spriggan.
She’d never suspected that his cell was so close to the Great Shaft. All she’d heard was that he was being held somewhere far away from the piskeys’ living quarters, and that only the Joan and Jack were allowed to see him. But she’d also been told that the spriggan wasn’t talking…and he was definitely talking now.
‘ What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by: Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I… ’
He’d calmed down now, at least enough to stop wailing for light and start talking to himself again. Richard? Was that his name? It sounded weirdly human. Ivy hadn’t thought of spriggans as having names before; to her they were all just spriggans, as snakes were snakes.
But if he had a name, then he had a personality. If he could talk about feeling pain and guilt and fear, there was a chance that he might be willing to talk about other things, as well. Like what he’d done with Keeve…
Or what had happened to Ivy’s mother.
Did Ivy dare? Could she climb down into the dark recesses of the shaft, find the tunnel where the spriggan was being held prisoner, and walk right up to his door? If she offered him a glimpse of the light he craved, would he tell her what she wanted so badly to know?
Mind, if anyone found out she had gone near the spriggan, Ivy would be in big trouble. But he could hardly hurt her while locked up in his cell. And if she didn’t take her chance with him now, she might spend the rest of her life wondering what would have happened if she had…