Read Changeling's Island - eARC for Free Online

she meant to make him work. Principally at pushing a heavy wheelbarrow. First it was weeds to the compost heap. Then it was hauling wood for the kitchen from the woodpile. She fed the chickens, and then told him to bring over two more loads of wood, as she went inside.
    * * *
    Áed knew she could see him. That was enough to worry him, without adding this place to it. Sadness and the murder hung about the building. Not the whole building, just the old part, built with salted timbers drawn from the sea.
    * * *
    Mary Ryan did not need to see anything much in her kitchen. It hadn’t changed a great deal in the last fifty years, and she could put her hand to anything she needed in the pitch dark. With the way her sight was, these days, it was just as well. And right now her eyes were also full of tears. She couldn’t see him well enough. But he sounded…and moved so like her Tom had, when he was young, before…before he’d gotten angry inside, before he’d left the island. Before he’d pushed away all that his people came from, pretending he was something he wasn’t. Before he’d gotten involved with that Irish woman. It hurt. Heaven knew it hurt still. Having the boy here…was like a sore tooth that had been a mere niggle until one had a cup of coffee.
    And yet…she’d desperately wanted him to hug her.
    This youngster wasn’t her Tom. That boy had grown up and rejected everything she’d fought for, worked for. This boy was like him…but not like him. And this boy had one of the shivery little people with him. Funny, she couldn’t see the boy’s face except out of the side of her vision, but she could see the little people just fine. They looked like the air over a hot road, but you could sometimes make out their faces.
    She sighed and turned back to the wood-burning range. She pushed the pot onto the heat. It was bad enough that she couldn’t really drive anymore, which made life difficult on the farm, but the boy would be expensive too. It was an expense that would have to be met.
    After all, all of this was for him, eventually.
    She’d promised her John, faithfully, when he’d gone off to war, that she’d look after the land. That there would always be a Ryan on it. Sometimes…sometimes she’d had the second sight. The inner eye that saw the future, and places far away. That always saw fragments…of truth. She’d seen her John die, her big, solid, beloved man, the only man who’d had the courage to come and dance with the black girls, and damn what anyone said. She’d seen him bleeding in the mud, three thousand miles away. She had known he was dead, long, long before they came to tell her. They’d said she was a hard woman. But she’d done her weeping by the time they brought the news. She was cried out by then.
    She stirred the pot fiercely. She’d been strong then, and strong when Tom had wanted her to sell the farm. She’d be strong now.
    When Tom had called to ask if she’d have the boy, she’d had a moment of the second sight again. Her eyesight was failing, but that inner eye still saw clearly. That inner eye showed her a vision, briefly, of a taller, broader boy than the one who had just crept into her yard. A boy with a straight back, in a red jacket, out on a boat with a stormy sky, and Roydon Island disappearing into the rain behind him, riding the wild waves, as if they were children’s tame ponies, and him with a broad smile on his face.
    It was a smile that took her back fifty years to a man she’d loved, and still did.
    After the seeing, after that vision, she couldn’t have said no, although she wasn’t sure how she was going to manage.
    The boy came into the kitchen from the yard. Didn’t even take his shoes off by the sounds of it. He had a lot to learn. But he was her grandson. “Welcome home, boy,” she said evenly, trying to hide the emotions he’d boiled up in her. “Now go wash yer hands. The bathroom’s up there, to yer left. Yer tea will be ready in a few