October 1.
Cloncarrig’s people unconsciously start counting down the days to Samhain. They still do their business: Go to work or school, get a haircut, do laundry, grab coffee. Sometimes they eat out in the evening. But long after the signal fire’s burned down, the smell of burning hawthorn permeates the air in a way that isn’t physical, and few people venture far from the town’s walls.

In the morning, Malachy and Alima go to a café with Bulan in tow, since they’ve both ended up with night shifts. It’s the first thing they actually planned to happen--at least, the first that hasn’t gone awry from the Folk’s interference.

“No. Fucking. Way.” Alima declares. “What got you into raves?”

“I don’t know, but it was fun,” Malachy tells her. “People said I gave great hugs.”

Oh, that smile’s not good. “Were you a candy raver?”

“Yes?” He hazards a drink of tea--luckily, she waits for him to finish. “We call them nightlights here.”

“Can you still tolerate the smell of Vick’s?”

“Shut it,” he warns her, struggling to keep a straight face. “I wouldn’t remember if I got sick of it because I was usually wasted.”

“Is all your candy locked in the basement so Logan doesn’t find out your sordid past?”

“I don’t want him to find out now! He’s twelve!” He leans back in the chair. “And we don’t have a basement!”

“Damn it,” Ned grumbles. “She loves teasing guys.” He sets himself between the two. Unfortunately, Malachy mistakes it for wanting to get petted.

“Does someone want scratching?”

“Fuck you, Goldilocks,” Ned huffs. (This doesn’t stop him from accepting it, though.)

---
At dinner, the Fianna catch sight of the smoke drifting into the Brú na Bóinne, and the illusion that they’re young men drops like flies: Heads crane up to let the smoke waft into their faces, with eyes gone wary and primal.

“Signal fire,” says Brighid after a drink. “Don’t worry, love, they’ll be out of it in a minute.”

The servants are careful around the suddenly-quiet boys: Everyone keeps an arm’s length away, stretching to grab plates instead of asking the Fianna to pass them along.

“Don’t worry, it’s about the Fairy Raid,” Ogma says. “We already suspected that, and we still need to figure out how to get Lucy’s hair back.”

“About the what?” Lucy asks.

“Every seven years in a Celtic place, the Folk pick seven people to kill.” The next part is very carefully neutral. “We’re pretty sure Alima’s one of them.”

“WHY?!”

“Nobody knows why,” Ogma says. “They’re the Folk. But Hades and Persephone are working on it. You can’t get better help for avoiding death than the gods of the dead.”

---
“Hey, Alima!” Mag drops by with Roger from the barber shop. “I know you’re not Japanese, but you’re the closest we’ve got and we need--”

“Is someone getting an Asian tattoo?” Alima asks.

Mag high-fives her and hands her a piece of paper. “Can you read this? Roger wants to get ‘warrior’ or ‘soldier.’”

“First problem: If I can read it, it’s probably not Japanese.” She beams. “Second problem: It looks like gibberish--oh, it’s just sideways!” A breeze has caught the paper, and she turns it to the left. “Chilled…? That line’s either crooked or just wrong...”

She grabs her pen to write it down properly. “‘Child’s joyous arrival!’ It’s the corny stuff we write for baby showers!”

“I knew Chinese classes would pay off!” Ned tells her. “And Lucy said we were being stereotypical!”

“Thanks, Alima.” Roger crumples the paper up. “You saved me forty euros.”

Mal has to lie on the table to contain his laughter. “Congratulations, mate! Is it a boy or--”

“Shut it!” Roger throws it in the trash.

---
“I wonder,” Mal says as Alima drives him back to his place. “Do you have any tattoos? Not specifically Chinese ones, but still."

Alima grins. “I had to promise Mom it could get covered up easily, but I got a shoulder tattoo!” She pushes the back of her shirt down, where a cave-painting grizzly bear in shades of ochre walks in a starry orb. “California Grizzly, bitches!”

“That’s awesome, who did it?” He tries not to prod it--the crumbling strokes are something only a painter would remember.

“One of my high school friends.” She lets it back up. “Jake Yee. He went to the Academy of Arts in SF, but his parents only wanted him to do normal landscapes or portraits. And he went ‘fuck that, I’mma do what I want.’ I just wanted a grizzly in space, but he’s like ‘You’re too small for photo tattoos,’ so he did a sketch for me. Sometimes he’s not all there,” Alima admits with a pat on Ned’s head. “I’d be talking to him, and suddenly I’d see the gears turning in his head, and then he’d say something weird. Like JD from Scrubs.”

“Oh, the Yee kid.” Ned sighs from the backseat. “I worry about him sometimes.”

“Well, a lot of artists are weird,” Mal tells her with a grin, and then he muses, “We don’t have bears in Ireland anymore. In the wild, at least.”

---
“--and the bear tattoo,” Lucy tells Danu.

The older redhead shakes her head knowingly. “How long did it take for you to cave?”

“If it’s covered up and not too big, it’s okay,” Lucy says. “You know, the Yee boy is the last person I’d expect to be a tattoo artist--”

“She has a tattoo?!” Nick homes in on the conversation. “Why didn’t you say so? Tattoos are good because it means we can get a link on her but it has to be the right kind!”

“…What?” Lucy asks. Thankfully, she’s not the only one feeling lost; Brighid is puzzled and Danu mildly disapproving.

“Nick means,” Ogma sighs, “that tattoos offer a way for us to communicate with Alima, if we have a god that deals with the subject or concept depicted in the tattoo.”

“Oh, the fancy old-fashioned magic!” Danu says. “Well, I suppose we should take whatever we can get. Here, I’ll start calling up the other Celts.” She heads over to the hearth, a primitive contrast to the updated fireplaces. “A bear tattoo! That’s Artio!” Danu says, delighted. “I haven’t seen her in ages!” But belying her enthusiasm, Danu stares long into the hearth-fire, and Brighid taps Lucy’s shoulder.

“It’ll take a while for them to arrange things. There are no bears outside of zoos anymore,” Brighid then turns to Ogma. “Ogma, can we nudge someone to get Alima a gift? The job is helping since Hades and Persephone noticed her, but gifts are smaller and faster.”

“Hmm.” The old man peers into his mug. “When’s Alima’s birthday?”

“February,” Lucy tells them with regret.

“Time to find her a place, then,” Brighid notes. “Housewarming parties, yay!”

---
October 3.
“Are you absolutely sure?” Pete the florist asks Alima while she’s looking at the weather-worn shieling. “I’ve been updating it as much as possible, but I couldn’t get central heating--the wood stove has a heat-distribution spell for the house. And people definitely think twice if a place is this close to the--”

“Yes, Pete, I know about being too close to the town walls. I can’t get in more trouble with the Folk than I am already, so: Does this at least have a toilet, electricity, and locks?” Alima asks him patiently.

“Toilet and shower in the lean-to, electricity is fine, and there’s a magic post for blackouts.” He steps inside the door with her to crank the post up from its resting spot. The quartz clanks at the end of its chain. “There’s a laundromat just a few blocks down Shearing Road, so you really only need cooking and drinking water most of the time. Here’s the post--just tap it with the quartz twice, and you’ll have backup power in a minute or two.”

“Does the door recognize your hand or your voice?” Her palm hovers a few inches away from the upper half’s center panel, but she doesn’t want to touch it in case she sets off the alarm.

“Hand,” he says. “Voices aren’t too reliable because of the Folk.”

Through the iron gates and the half-doors, the interior of the house is well-maintained with oak walls and shale flooring; the parlor is sandwiched between two twin-sized rooms, and the loft fits another person.

The lean-to on the south end is warm and surprisingly bright, and she notes that the sandstone has been carefully blended in with shale for a darker and subtler red.

“My father remembers when Granddad and his oldest brother made it, so it’s forty or so years old--about half the age of the rest of the house,” Pete tells her. “The back garden was for vegetables and herbs, but I got rid of most of the plants once my grandmother died. Not including the house and front garden, the full size of the property’s a bit less than a hectare.”

“So that’s two and a half acres? Great.” She spots a circle of sunken stones by the gate. “Ooh, you didn’t say the well was right by--”

“Not the well!” He stops her. “That’s an offering pool! The well is by the twins--the ash trees.” He points to the south gate, where their crowns rise high. “There’s a cistern, too.”

“Oh.” She keeps at arm’s length. “That explains why I needed my own house altar. Last time I saw an offering pool was in the Philippines when I was nine.”

---
The Dagda’s laughing his ass off. (And with his build, it’s no mean feat.)

“Brighid, you couldn’t find a place that’s NOT on top of the walls?” The Morrigan face-palms amidst the king’s hysterics. “Or at least a little more modern?”

“If I could talk to her, I’d have a better plan, but we all know the problem with that!” Brighid huffs. “Cheap, fast, and good--I picked cheap and fast with the basics!”

“Morrigan, don’t argue with Brighid about house sales,” Danu warns, but there’s a telltale strain of held-back laughter.

---
There’s a few jars of deep purple jam in the fridge, which surprises Alima since she hasn’t seen any berry bushes.

“Elderberry,” Pete tells her when she asks. “The oak stand has a few elder trees--Grandmum made buckets of jam to sell every year, so she taught Aunt Helen and me.”

“Are you farmers or herders?” Alima wonders.

“My aunt’s families grow half barley and half flax for linen and linseed. Plus grapes; the trellises are on the house fence. The Scots pine used to mark the start of the east field. Granddad sold that to the Fletchers once the crop multiplying spell got invented, so then they just made a new hedgerow crossing between them. Grandmum also made baskets.” Pete crosses to the silverware. “Here we go.”

He sticks a spoon in the jar and hands it over to Alima--the jam is sweet-tart and earthy, but in a different way than blackberry.

“This tastes awesome!” She looks at the wardrobe, the wooden trunk, and the shallow baskets under the bed for the linens.

The windows are deep-revealed, as traditional cottage windows are, and the bronze-inlaid shutters have a patina that speaks as much to the age as to the need to protect the glass.

---
“Ned’s going to love all that wood around,” Lucy watches the glass of the scrying window. “Is Artio a minor goddess? I don’t remember you guys taking more than a day to get places.”

“Hmm? No, she’s very powerful,” Danu says. “But there are no bears in Ireland anymore, so she’s had to stick to Britain and the continent most of the time.”

---
The shieling’s getting in on years, but even Pete’s basic maintenance has kept it a lot more energetic than most seventy-year-old houses. It hums a tune from the flagstones as Alima walks through it.

Buyer, it notes. Odd.

“Mm-hmm,” Alima says with a chuckle. “I’ve been looking since I got here, so I’m kind of worn out. You have some updates and you’re not too big, so I’m good.”

Desperate! The shieling’s shutters quiver with amusement.

“I have a really big dog, so are you okay with that?” She asks.

Dog, it scoffs. Chickens. It shows her a few memories--rooster crows waking up three generations of stubborn teens, squabbling hens, and messy thefts from foxes.

After a while, she’s noticed that everything of metal--the bedframes, the window frames, the door latches and nails and shutters--is made of iron, like the high fence surrounding the house. There’s no hard thinking for that: Iron repels the Folk.

“How much would your trial period be?” She wonders.

Pete, it calls. Math!

“Oh, you asked a payment question,” he comes in from the garden. “It’s good with kids and animals, but math? That’s part of why it turns off the buyers.”

“How much is your trial?”

“Ehhh, ten thousand--seven thousand’s returned if you decide not to go through. I’ll drop to five thousand if you’re set before ten days. Full price is fifty thousand euros, and you can pay five hundred to three thousand for the monthly.”

“You’re selling for fifty thousand?!”

“It’s right by the walls and it’s only half-modern,” Pete points out. “After five years we’ve gotten a lot of tourists who chicken out a few days after the trial because they ran into the Folk. Or they have to use a wood stove and a well. Or the nonexistent storage space. In fact, we were planning on renting the rooms out or turning it into a bed and breakfast before I remembered you’re looking for a place.”

She looks around the parlor. “So you said it came with a table--is it in the shed or something?”

“The normal one? It’s a falling table.” He moves to the rounded wooden board by the window and unhooks it, letting the table legs swing into place to rest on the floor.

“Oh my god, that’s awesome!”

“I know, right? Gets a lot of tourists excited.” He hangs it back up. “It fits five or six. We have a dining table in the shed for special occasions. It fits a dozen, or fifteen if you cram everyone in.”

“What’s up, Mini-Me?” The voice makes them jolt, and Alima spots a woman in hijab. “So this is where you are!”

“Oh! Pete, this is my aunt,” she tells him. “Her name’s… Alima. It’s a coincidence, I wasn’t named after her. She married my uncle when I was little.”

“Nice to meet you,” he says. “Do you want me to step out?”

“Just a minute, thank you,” Alima says.

“Shit’s been crazy after Ned and Lucy disappeared!” The older Alima sits on the loft ladder. “And then you moved right when we thought you were starting to cool down. I’m sorry, sweetie, we should have talked to you sooner.”

“No, it’s fine,” says Alima. “I didn’t move because of the ancestors, it’s just… well, things were crazy. Didn’t Tito tell you about it?”

“You know when stuff happens to the family.” The older Alima kicks at a rung. “Even if Jordan wanted to tell me, things got fuzzy for a while. So, this is an adorable place--when were you the get-back-to-nature type?”

“It’s less ‘get back to nature’ and more ‘really fucking cheap,’” Alima admits. “It’s going for fifty thousand and he’s halving the trial payment if I’m good before it’s over. He’s been trying to sell it for five years now.”

“Masha’Allah! That’s a good deal!” Her aunt--and it strikes Alima that they’re nearly the same age now--takes a look in the fridge. “Oh shit, is that blackberry jam? I’m not going to eat it, I’m just wondering.”

“Elderberry,” Alima replies. “It’s good! When I’m in the trial period, I’ll grab a jar from Pete and you guys can try some!”

“Are you paying before or after the trial?”

“After,” she admits. “His monthly payments are flexible, but I want to get my paycheck next week just to be safe.”

---
When she’s packed a bag for her house trial, Alima finds it a good sign that Bulan starts tugging her along the hedgerow.

“Oh, he sniffed out my nephew’s beagle!” Pete notes with amusement, but once they realize Bulan’s going to the offering pool, he panics and yanks on the leash. “Oi! No drinking that, it’s magic!”

“Don’t worry, he knows not to touch magic things! Bulan! Sit!” Alima appreciates his help when the dog only slows down, though, and the two of them get Bulan to stop a few feet off. “Bulan, sit,” she repeats, and he does so with a whine.

“You can’t handle that thing alone,” Pete tells her with a weary smile. “How in God’s name did you get him?”

“Malachy and I found him in the street and he likes me a lot, so I adopted him.”

The florist clucks. “Got thrown out for getting too big, I bet.”

“He might have been hit by a car after he got abandoned--he was hurt when we found him.”

“Hmph.” Pete shakes his head. “Well, get settled in and then I’ll check up on you in the morning. The shieling knows to lock everything if you forget, so don’t worry about that. You should take care about the fire, though. Either keep it small so it burns out quick, or smoor it before you head off to bed. Do you need a reminder?” He asks.

“No, it’s fine. I wrote it down.”

“Just ask the shieling in case something goes wrong, though. It’s seen four generations of kids failing at shit, so it’s very patient.”

“I will, don’t worry!” She laughs.

---
In the nighttime Ned wanders the house, looking for a way to get to the offering pool. He can hear voices coming from it, even with the windows closed, and he stands up on the window with an irritated growl.

Dog. Keeping watch? says the shieling fondly, but then the flagstones clatter in surprise. Not a dog! Cursed!

“You know I’m human?” Ned asks it.

Folk curse! The shieling explains with a creak of the walls, but it quiets down when Alima mumbles a sleepy protest. The Hunter, it says to Ned, who nods.

“I need to get to the offering pool,” Ned tells it, and the lower half of the front door opens quietly.

Inside the fence, it warns him. Short time. Too close to the walls.

“Why did she pick you?” Ned moans as he crosses to the kitchen. “Nothing against you, but… the Folk.”

Not picked by her, the shieling says. Saint Brighid’s work--very fast, very afraid. Any home better than none.

“Can’t argue with that,” Ned admits, and grabs a piece of bread from the counter before he heads out the door.

The offering pool smells like the gods of this land: Bold and fiery, even though the cold’s setting in. Within the ripples are whispers--Ned doesn’t drop the bread in yet, but waits a moment to listen.

“Lucy?” Ned asks. “Are you there?”

“--just from a tiny snip of--I’m sorry, I thought I heard Ned for a minute,” Lucy breaks off.

“You did, love!” Reassures a young red-haired girl. “Check the window! He’s at the offering pool!”

“Ned!” But her smile is short-lived as she crams the information in: “Honey, I’m not sure how much you know, but I’m stuck in the Otherworld because the deer-man--the Hunter--he cut off a piece of my hair--”

“I found that out a few days ago,” he says. “The Lady of Scales told me.”

“The fish your dad talks to?”

“She’s not a fish, Lucy, she’s--okay, next part!”

“He’s going to kill her!” Lucy pleads. “He kidnapped us to get Alima to go to Ireland, and he wants to murder seven fucking people in some sick game of his! I have to get a tiny clump of hair back from said murdering fairy before I even think about helping my own daughter!”

“He won’t kill her if I kill him first!” Ned tells her, hackles rising.

“Ned, you’re a dog!” Lucy reminds him.

“I swore an oath to the Lady of Scales,” he explains. “I’ll kill him before he gets anyone in the Fairy Raid.”

“I… all right, then,” She wipes at her face. “Okay, you know that tattoo I let her get?”

“The fucking bear?”

“It’s actually a good thing,” she says. “There’s a bear-goddess who’s friends with the Irish.”

“So you’re the much-spoken-of Ned,” the redhead cranes over the first woman’s shoulder. “I’m Brighid, Mr. Song--your daughter should be meeting me in a few days.”

“The house said you told it to take Alima,” Ned says.

“It was the best I could do without being able to talk to her,” Brighid apologizes. “But it’s a very experienced house, at least. Once she’s settled, she’ll have ties to Ireland. And she’ll also get housewarming gifts, so that’ll speed things up!”

“Most people just treat it as a party now, so I’m not sure how effective the housewarming will actually be,” Ned warns her.

“Most people,” she sings, wagging a finger at him.

The shieling rumbles gently to warn him how long he’s been out, so Ned drops the bread into the pool. “I love you,” he says as the waters start to churn.

“I love you, too!” Lucy calls as the door shuts behind him.

Next Chapter: XXII: all dressed in black