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that she wanted to flee Killybeg?
    “Maisie –”
    “Acting now will only
arouse suspicion.”
    “Mam,” Wyn’s voice
interrupted, the music stopping. “The sheep are shut up. Let’s go home.”
     

     
    I sat up in my bed, pulse pounding in my neck
and my heart racing, and wiped a shaking hand across my sweaty forehead. I’d
dreamed that dream again.
    I’d told Maisie about it
once, when I was younger, and she’d scolded me for making up fairy tales. So
I’d kept it to myself ever since, cradling it close like a precious gem. It was
always the same.
    It started with me walking
in the Haunted Wood, then coming upon a clearing bathed in an ethereal pink
light. It was a clearing I had never seen in the real Haunted Wood, no matter
how long and hard I looked. I could only find it in this dream. There was a
great big willow tree in the middle of the clearing, with long, weepy branches
creating a green dome. Every time, as soon as I neared it, a smiling face would
peek out through the silky branches. A face I recognized in the dream. It was
my mother.
    Of course, it wasn’t my
real mother. I’d never seen my parents’ likenesses, so there was no way for me
to dream of them. But what orphan doesn’t dream of her parents? In the dream, I
knew this was my mother. And for now, that’s all I had – a dream mother.
In fact, that’s all I would ever have.
    In my dream, the woman with
big bouncy curls like my own would sweep the branches aside like a curtain and
gesture for me to join her. Inside, hummingbirds crowded the air like flies.
Big, beautiful flies that squeaked with excitement.
    There were parts of the
dream that I never remembered. I knew I played with my mother, but I never
heard her voice or could recall the games we played. I only memorized her
happy, shining face.
    But the dream ended the
same way every time.
    There would be a great roar
and the woman would tremble in fright. And though I sometimes knew it was a
dream, and what was coming, I was always scared.
    The hummingbirds wailed and
my dream mother shook until tears fell from her eyes. The roar grew so loud, it
sounded as though there was a great lion outside the willow tree. And then a
tiny orange flame would lick a branch.
    And it would grow. The
woman would cry and I would cover my ears, willing myself to wake up as flames
engulfed the tree.
    Eventually, I’d wake.
Sweating, scared, and determined. Determined to go back to the Haunted Wood. Because
if the little girls I saw there had been real people, long ago, those could be
their ghosts. Real ghosts. And if
ghosts were real, maybe, just maybe, I could see my mother. Not the one from my
dream, concocted by a heartbroken child’s flighty imagination, but my real mother. And maybe my father, too.
Long dead now, my only hope of seeing them with my own eyes would be in a
haunted wood.

Chapter Six
     
    “We shouldn’t be in here, Ruby!”
    “Do what you want, Cath,” I
snapped. “I’m going in.” I stepped defiantly into the woods. As I placed a hand
on an old oak to steady myself and climbed over a fallen branch, a trio of
hummingbirds appeared and danced happily around my head. I giggled and ducked
my head to see around the blurry wings as they squeaked to each other in their
little language. They moved around me like planets orbiting the Earth, and we
moved forward together like that. My own little universe.
    “What if the stranger was a
thief?” Cath insisted. “Or, or what if he’s trying to enslave people to work in
the mines? Or what if –”
    “Then what good would the
two of us be to him?”
    “Or what if he’s a murderer
looking for souls to sacrifice?”
    “Somebody’s been listening
to Pat Manor too much,” I muttered. Cath had the imagination of a scared child,
but she was the only girl in town I could even remotely stand to be with. The
others talked of kissing and boys and marriage nonstop. I wouldn’t have called
Cath a friend exactly, but she was better than