Here is Rowenna herself and her swan-cursed boys, in all their tumultuous glory. I could not be more thrilled about how the cover artist, Kim Ekdahl, has captured Rowenna and the individual nature of each of the boys in her care.
And lastly, if like me, you’re the sort who likes to sample the merchandise before you buy it, well, discerning reader, I have an excerpt just for you 😉
A RUSH OF WINGS
Prologue
“When will you show me how to do that?” Rowenna Winthrop asked her mother. She was newly turned nine, and Mairead had been promising for years to teach her the secret of working craft.
They were out on the headland beyond the village of Neadeala, where the cliffs grew steep, dropping from a breakneck height to narrow spits of shingle where waves shattered and foamed. Mairead had a shovel with her, and was digging up stones, which she laid in waist-high cairns and infused with protective power.
“Not yet, love. Not for awhile,” Mairead said absently, but a frown drew her golden brows together. Rowenna flushed with shame—she knew what her mother was thinking of. Only that morning Rowenna had let her brother Duncan, the closest to her in age, tease her into a towering passion. She’d thrown herself at him, pummeling her brother with her small fists while he only laughed.
“If I could, I’d string you up by your toes,” Rowenna had hissed at Duncan. “I’d skin you alive and pull your guts out and feed them to the cliff wyverns. That’d teach you a lesson.”
Mairead, fair-haired and forever composed, had overheard it all from across the single long room of the Winthrop’s cottage. She’d been standing before the tall, warp-weighted loom at which she wove fine woolen broadcloth to sell. Her hand holding the shuttle stilled at Rowenna’s sharp words, but she’d said nothing—just taken it all in and carried on with her work.
Rowenna knew, though, that this was why Mairead would not teach her craft—the making of stone cairns into wards, and the fashioning of green and growing things into charms or possets. You must have control of yourself in order to work with power, Mairead reminded Rowenna often.
And Rowenna knew Mairead saw no signs of that control in her yet.
“Maybe next year?” Rowenna asked hopefully, and Mairead smiled, her cornflower blue gaze soft with affection.
“Aye, love. Maybe next year.”
~~~~~~~~~~
“Do you think I’m ready now?” Rowenna asked, trying vainly to keep impatience from creeping into her words. It was midsummer of her thirteenth year, and two summers back she’d begun to hear the voice of the wind. It made little sense to her, but Mairead had told Rowenna it was a good sign, that she’d work powerful craft when her time came, for a piece of nature itself had chosen to be her ally.
Yet her time never seemed to come.
Once again, they were on the cliffs, but today they kept near home. The Winthrops’ stone cottage stood a hundred yards away, smoke spiraling from the chimney. A shaggy cow cropped grass at the end of a picket and Rowenna’s youngest brother Finn, who was only two, lay napping on a blanket in the sun.
Mairead, who’d been burying iron nails at intervals in the rich peat soil, straightened and glanced at Rowenna.
“What did George Groom say to you on Sunday after church?” she asked. “I know he can be a difficult lad—Duncan’s fought with him a dozen times if he’s done it once.”
Rowenna looked down at her feet.
“Enna,” Mairead coaxed. “What did the boy say?”
“He said you’re a witch,” Rowenna answered reluctantly. “And that I must be a witch too. Not just that, either—he said…”
She faltered. But Mairead was waiting, her beautiful face mild and expectant.
“He said I must be the spawn of a union between you and the devil himself, because I look nothing like you or my brothers or like Athair,” Rowenna finished, using the Gaidhlig for father as was her practice.
“I’m sorry,” Mairead said. Pity underpinned the words, but with a sickening drop of her stomach, Rowenna guessed what would come next. Her mother was too shrewd and too clever by far.
“What did you say in reply?” Mairead asked. There was no accusation in the question. It was just an inquiry after fact, but Rowenna felt pinned down, like a gutted herring staked out to dry.
“I said he was right and that I’d lay a curse on him,” Rowenna replied. “I told George I’d ask the devil, my father, to drag him down to hell for fighting with Duncan and speaking ill of you.”
Even now, she couldn’t keep a note of anger from ringing out with her words. How dare George say such things, when everyone knew how hard the Winthrops worked, and that the Grooms were shiftless and lazy, the whole lot of them?
“Hm.” Mairead took an iron nail from her apron pocket and set it into the earth. “Go check on Finn, won’t you, love? I think he’s waking.”
And Rowenna knew she should not ask about craft again for some time.
~~~~~~~~~~
“I’m fifteen today,” Rowenna said desperately to Mairead as they stood side by side, washing the breakfast dishes. “Athair reminded me this morning before he left.”
There were English soldiers billeted at a few of the homes in Neadeala, and Rowenna’s father Cam was in a rage about it, though no troops had come to the Winthrop cot on its lonely clifftop. Cam had kissed Rowenna upon waking, and told her happy birthday, and gone straightaway to Laird Sutherland to see what could be done about the redcoats in the village.
Likely nothing, Rowenna knew. Ever since the English king had sent his youngest half-brother to Inverness to be rid of him, small battles and uprisings had sparked intermittently across the Highlands, like so many torches guttering to life only to be snuffed out. The boy in Inverness was ambitious, folk said, and determined to set up a court to rival that of his kin in the south. He’d come with troops of his own, and Rowenna had overheard Cam say time and again that the Highlands were a scapegoat England had used to avoid yet another bloody civil war.
But they were not used to servitude in this wild and free place. Fealty to a laird was one thing. The tyranny of a distant king’s inconvenient relation and the yoke of bondage that came with him was quite another. In the Highlands, that could not be borne.
“Fifteen today!” Mairead gasped, her face lighting at the reminder. “So you are. I’m sorry it slipped my mind with all that’s going on. Poor Enna, scrubbing the porridge pot on her birthday. Dry your hands and come sit a moment with me—the dishes will keep.”
Obediently, Rowenna wiped her hands and let herself be drawn over to the hearth, where Mairead settled into a rocking chair and Rowenna sat on the floor, resting her head against her mother’s knees. Mairead ran one hand over Rowenna’s black hair and the girl shut her eyes, knowing what would come next. It was tradition between them, that every year Mairead would recount the story of Rowenna’s birth.
“The night you were born, the sea raged at our shores,” Mairead began, and Rowenna smiled. She knew this story by heart, but loved to hear it told. “I’d never seen weather to match it—the waves beat so hard at the cliffs that their spray hit against our windows, along with the rain. It was as if the ocean and I had chosen to make war with each other, both of us laboring away as the night dragged on. Finally, near dawn, you slipped into the world. But as you did, the breakers below the cliffs surged so high and the wind gusted so fiercely, one of the storm shutters tore from its hinges. When the midwife held you up to the lantern to look at you, salt spray caught you full in the face. You squalled at the sea and the sea squalled back, and that was your first baptism, by the wind and the ocean, before ever a priest laid hands on you.”
Mairead’s touch was gentle as she combed through Rowenna’s hair. Opening her eyes, Rowenna stared at the peat embers burning on the hearth, and gathered her courage.
“All I want this year is for you to teach me our craft,” she said, and regretted the words the moment they’d left her. Once she’d spoken her heart’s wish, it could not be unsaid.
Mairead’s hands stilled, and Rowenna knew at once that the answer would be no again.
“I saw you,” Mairead told her, and a hint of reproach crept into her mother’s gentle voice. “I saw you in the village, Rowenna, when that redcoat passed you by.”
Ice lodged itself in the pit of Rowenna’s stomach. Only the day before she’d gone into Neadeala with Mairead, to buy sugar and lamp oil. One of the billeted redcoats had brushed against Rowenna and said something foul as he did.
The wind had been rustling about her, restless and longing, murmuring over and over to itself in its senseless way.
Rowenna Rowenna Rowenna, our love, our own, our light.
And Rowenna, who had not yet received a moment’s instruction in craft, yielded to temptation and tried to curse the redcoat. With one piece of her, she reached out to the wind, and with the other she focused all her hurt and spite and shame on the retreating soldier. What she wanted to bring about with her unschooled craft, she didn’t know. But she longed to sting, as she had been stung. She’d found herself spineless and powerless, though, and that had cut her deeper than even the redcoat’s words.
“I can’t teach you yet,” Mairead said decidedly. “But you must keep asking, my saltwater girl.”
Her hands began to move again, once more running through Rowenna’s hair. “Even rock wears away before saltwater in the end. One day, you’ll be ready.”
Rowenna was relieved to have her mother at her back, so that Mairead could not see the hot tears yet another dismissal brought to her eyes. For the first time, despair washed over the girl. She would never be free of anger. If that was the requirement for learning craft, then she’d have to live all her life in ignorance, and cut off this part of herself entirely.
“Yes, Mathair,” she said dully. “I can wait.”
But in her heart of hearts, Rowenna knew she would not be able to bring herself to ask for her mother’s help again.
Chapter One
Three Years Later
Rowenna found her mother on the clifftops to the northeast of the Winthrop cottage. It was a storm-tossed March night—the sky was a boil of approaching thunderheads, and Mairead Winthrop crouched on her hands and knees, scrabbling for stones in the scant, unyielding earth of the cliffs.
It hadn’t been hard for Rowenna to find Mairead. A nameless something, a pull at her bones, had alerted her to the fact that her mother was missing and drawn her here. The untapped craft within Rowenna led her places of its own accord with increasing frequency now, but she said nothing of it to anyone, and ignored the call when she could. Mairead had made it clear enough that Rowenna was ill-suited for this sort of work, and too undisciplined for power. And Rowenna had resolved not to grasp for power if that was so. If she had to wait a lifetime to be taught her craft, then wait she would, even if the wordless pulls and yearnings within her tore her apart.
“Mathair, come inside,” Rowenna begged. “This is no weather to be out in.”
Anxious things clawed at the insides of her ribcage at the sight of Mairead. The oncoming storm hadn’t yet swallowed up the last grey light of dusk, and she could see that her mother was filthy. Dark soil stained Mairead’s clothes and clung to her skin, and her nails were broken and bloodied from wrestling with rocks she’d dug up and built into a lopsided cairn. Far below them, the angry sea worried away at the cliffs, its constant muttering having built up to a discontented roar.
Whatever Mairead was doing, Rowenna did not understand it. All her life she’d sat by observing her mother’s craft, trying to still the shards of it that lurked beneath her own skin until such a time as she was deemed ready. An all too familiar sense of frustration and confusion washed over Rowenna, bitter enough for her to choke on.
“Go home, Enna,” Mairead pleaded. “There’s nothing you can do to help.”
Rowenna stayed as she was, wracked with indecision.
You’re not ready yet, Mairead had told her so many times, with or without words. Perhaps you never will be.
But there was hunger in Rowenna Winthrop, no matter how she strove to keep it in check. A hunger to know her inexplicable pieces better. A starveling desire to be whole and understood, even if only by herself.
“Enna!” Mairead insisted.
Rather than do as she was bid, Rowenna sank to her knees at her mother’s side. A cold, fitful rain was starting up, and she knew if her father, Cam, had been there, he’d have dealt with this very differently. If he’d been home, he’d have coaxed Mairead in out of this weather, taking her back to the Winthrop cot and warming her by the fire. He’d have soothed her with quiet words and his steadfast presence, the way he’d done for all of the Winthrops at one time or another.
But Cam was gone and had been for months. The English tyrant in Inverness still kept his upstart and unwanted court, and the disparate sparks of rebellion had been fanned to full flame by his cruelty. Cam had left to join the Highlands uprising, and in his absence, there was only Rowenna to manage Mairead’s fey moods, for her brothers found them entirely unnerving. Well, so did Rowenna, but she did not have the luxury of casting off her mother’s care onto someone else.
Setting her lantern down, Rowenna pushed up the sleeves of her oilskin and slowly began to dig at Mairead’s side. It seemed simple enough—to pull rocks from the earth. There was no craft in that on its own. No witchwork. Her mother was sobbing with fear, the whites of her eyes gleaming in the lantern’s feeble glow. It was catching, that fear, and however benign the work, soon Rowenna’s belly roiled with nerves. She’d seen Mairead compelled to do things before—to build her cairns on the clifftops at the solstices and equinoxes; to spin yarn and knit new pullovers for every one of the Winthrop boys well before their old clothes had worn out.
But none of it had ever been like this.
This wasn’t just a compulsion. This was raw panic.
The wind died down for a moment, and Rowenna realized with a chill that the strange, rhythmic sound she’d heard beneath the gale was not the omnipresent sea, breaking against the shore, but Mairead herself. Her lips moved constantly as she muttered the words of the Our Father, over and over again as she worked.
Our Father, who art in Heaven
Hallowed be Thy name
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done…
Deliver us from evil
Deliver us from evil
Deliver us from evil
“Mathair?” Rowenna finally managed to get the word out. She pried a rock free from the iron-hard earth and handed it to Mairead, who took it with a shamefaced look. “What is it you’re afraid of? What are you doing? And how can I help?”
It was the first time in three years that Rowenna had put a question to her mother about the nature of her work.
Mairead glanced towards the sea, her eyes owl-like in the gloom.
“I’m making a ward,” she said. “A hedge against the devil and his creatures. A work of protection, built of hard stone and unshakeable intent.”
Rowenna’s throat tightened and she let the mud-slick rock she held fall from her hands. “I can’t help you then. I don’t know how to make a ward. You know that.”
“Just go,” Mairead ordered, her voice ragged with despair. “Please, Enna. There’s nothing you can do here.”
Slowly, Rowenna got to her feet and looked down at Mairead. And despite her own ignorance, despite the mistrust that had driven a wedge between them, Rowenna loved her. Loved Mairead with a fierceness and wildness made sharper by the tension of knowing her mother saw her as too quick-tempered to help in this work.
“Come with me,” Rowenna pleaded. “Whatever you’re doing can wait. No one’s asked you to take on the burden of protecting this land—it’s too much, and you’ll get no thanks for it in the end. Leave it, and come home.”
When Mairead looked up, there were tears shining in her eyes, but she shook her head. “I can’t, Enna. I just can’t. Someday you’ll understand.”
That cut Rowenna to the quick, because were it not for Mairead’s resistance, she’d understand already. All around them, the wind keened across the moorland, repeating stormy words in a hollow, rain-sodden lament.
She comes, she comes, she comes.
Scrambling to her feet, Mairead disappeared into the deepening twilight. Wind howled over the cliffs and set the rain to stinging like bees by the time she returned. Rowenna glanced up and a strangled gasp escaped her, for under one arm her mother bore an incongruous burden—a great white trumpeter swan, the creature oddly quiescent with Mairead’s hand covering its eyes. Rain beaded off its soft plumage, and its neck arched gracefully.
“What are you—” Rowenna began, but Mairead shook her head. She set the swan down atop the completed cairn, and the bird stood up, ruffling its feathers.
“Eala,” Mairead said, calling the bird by its name in Gaidhlig. “For years I’ve helped your kind on their long journeys across the sea. Now I stand here in need of an offering from something wild and pure to make fast my ward, and protect this land. Will you do as I ask? Will you help me?”
Rowenna shivered as the swan bowed low. Since she was a child, she’d fed the swans with her mother when they stopped in their wandering from north to south. A handful of times, when birds arrived exhausted or injured, she and Mairead had taken them in, tending to them at the Winthrop hearth until they were well enough to carry on.
Mairead bowed back. “Thank you, beloved.”
But when Mairead reached into the pocket of her overskirt and pulled out a sheathed gutting knife, Rowenna could watch no longer. It was one thing to be up on the cliffs laying out wards in a gathering storm. To do harm to a living creature with this strange work, though—that was more than even Rowenna with her hunger had ever wanted. That felt like darkness.
Her eldest brother Liam with his priest’s leanings would have a thing or two to say about all this. Ungodly, he’d call it. Unforgivable.
“No, Mathair,” Rowenna said breathlessly, hurrying forward and taking hold of Mairead’s arm. “Surely there’s another way to finish your work.”
“Enna, I asked you to go for a reason. But it’s only a little blood,” Mairead assured her, quieter and calmer now that her work seemed to be near-finished. “Just a drop or two. The swan will be fine, love. We’ve done it before, the swans and me.”
“You’ve done this before?” The knowing that her mother had repeated this ritual in secret burned through Rowenna. It was as if an entire other life existed, beyond the one Rowenna knew, and Mairead had struggled to keep her out of it. Yet it should be hers by rights—didn’t her bones cry out for power and craft, just as her mother’s did?
Betrayal made Rowenna angry, and she chose her words with the intent of wounding.
“I didn’t realize that all this time, you’ve been just what they say you are in the village.” Rowenna spoke with defiance, and for the first time that she could remember, Mairead met her sharpness with answering anger.
“Say the word if you’re bent on doing harm,” Rowenna’s mother snapped.
“You know what it is,” Rowenna answered.
“I do. But I want you to speak it.”
Rowenna drew herself up. “They call you a witch. And they call me a witch too, though I’ve none of the craft of one. I bear all the blame, and none of the power.”
Her voice wavered a little at the last, and Mairead winced.
“Enna, I’m sorry,” she said, her words hardly audible over the wind’s cries. “I’m sorry I was cross with you and I’m sorry for what they say. I didn’t want any of this for you. Believe me when I tell you that all I’ve ever wanted is to keep you and our village safe.”
“Then let me help in earnest,” Rowenna pleaded. “Show me what needs to be done. Teach me. We’ll finish this work together, and when it’s complete we can go home together, too. The boys are waiting. Finn’s asleep, but Liam will read aloud, and you and I can help Duncan untangle his nets. Then in the morning, let me keep helping you, Mathair. Stop trying to cut me off from who we are and what we can do.”
Mairead hesitated, glancing from the swan to Rowenna and back again.
“You’re a good lass, Enna,” she said. “Truly you are. I don’t know what your father and I have done to deserve you, my saltwater girl.”
Rowenna swallowed back tears and waited, hardly daring to breathe.
“Alright,” Mairead said at last. “I need you to show me your courage now, if you’re to be a help.”
Still standing on the cairn, the swan regarded them both with knowing dark eyes. But as Mairead and Rowenna turned to it, something startled the creature. It half-ran, half-flew past them, wings buffeting the air as it fled.
“Eala!” Mairead called, and started after the swan. “Don’t leave me. Our work’s not done!”
From somewhere in the gathering dark, the creature let out a riotous trumpeting which echoed off the stormy cliffsides. Rowenna ran after Mairead who chased the swan, until abruptly, the clamorous sounds of the white bird were cut off. Mairead froze, and Rowenna fell still at her side.
“What is it, Mathair?” Rowenna asked, her voice little more than a whisper that the wind caught and carried away.
“I don’t know.” Mairead shook her head. “I don’t know, but my work will have to stay unfinished. We’ll be safest at home now. Come with me, and hurry.”
She grasped Rowenna’s hand and pulled her along, and Rowenna went willingly, heart beating so hard within her that it hurt.
They were just passing Iteag Burn, where a stream rushed over the cliff face and down a steep track to the sea, when Rowenna tripped and nearly stumbled. Pausing, she lowered her lantern only to find one of Mairead’s cairns in a scattered heap. Atop what remained of it lay a shapeless white and crimson object.
Rowenna’s pulse quickened, and for a moment her breath refused to come.
“Is that your swan?” she finally managed to get out.
Without answering, Mairead stepped forward. When she set a hand on the white shape, the once-elegant head and neck of the swan lolled over her broken ward. The creature’s breast feathers were sodden with gore, for it had been torn apart, its ribcage split and all the soft and vital pieces inside stolen, so that it was no more than an empty husk. No more than the twisted idea of a bird, rather than the thing itself.
“What did this, Mathair?”
She comes, she comes, she comes, the wind sang desperately to Rowenna, as unreasoning fear woke inside the girl.
“I won’t speak the name of the thing that’s done this. Not here, not tonight,” Rowenna’s mother said with a tense shake of her head. “But I mustn’t leave the bird, not when it would have offered me blood to keep us safe. I must at least give it back to the sea.”
Mairead glanced at Rowenna, and the girl’s chest ached with fierce devotion, and with familiar hunger and longing.
“I think I’ve been wrong, to keep you in the dark,” Mairead said slowly. “And I think you’re ready. You are who you are, and there’s no changing that. We’ll work together from now on, my saltwater girl. Just as soon as we get through this night.”
When she pressed a kiss to Rowenna’s forehead, it felt like a benediction. Like a new beginning. Like the moment Rowenna had waited for all her life.
Mairead bundled up the broken swan and carried it to the edge of the cliff. There she lingered, murmuring something to the lifeless bird, but her voice was stolen by the wind. Toeing blank space with the breakers pounding endlessly against the shore below, she let the dead swan slip from her arms. There was a flash of white, and the darkness and the distance swallowed the creature up.
At last Mairead turned back to her daughter, and to the blur of the Highlands, shrouded in stinging rain. She reached out, and for the briefest, tantalizing moment, her fingers brushed warm against Rowenna’s own.
In spite of the storm, Rowenna smiled, overcome by a surge of pure relief. Things would be better now that they’d come to an understanding. Mairead smiled back, and for a moment Rowenna’s fear quieted.
Then with a strangled cry Mairead was torn away, as something reached out of the darkness and dragged her down the wet and treacherous track of the burn.
