The Keeper (19 page)

Oisín looked down at the words in front of him, the words that had changed his life:
To Oisín Keane, the Keeper of the Book of Magic
. Could he really give it away?

‘Just a little name, that's all it is.'

A memory lurched in the back of Oisín's brain. ‘Remember your name,' Granny Keane had said, just before the DART had left Pearse station. The great elk had said the same thing in the Forest of Shadows. What did his name mean?

‘Oisín, my little deer,' Granny Keane used to say when he was a baby, stroking his curls fondly. ‘My little deer, Oisín the gentle.' Was he supposed to turn into a deer? Could he grow antlers? Was he supposed to be gentle?

The Morrígan tapped her fingernails against her cloak.

‘Not feeling so generous?' she said.

With one motion of her hand, a different set of spiders appeared, carrying a large item wrapped tightly in their silken thread. It was Stephen. He was wrapped tight as a mummy, but still breathing.

‘The finest warrior in Ireland!' The Morrígan laughed nastily. She bent down to Sorcha as if they were the best of friends. ‘Remember what we talked about, sweetie?'

A strange expression passed across Sorcha's face and she nodded.

‘No!' Oisín cried as Sorcha held up her heavy sword.

He picked up the pen. He could feel the Book fluttering in his palms.

‘Don't give it to her,' Stephen yelled, looking at the sword held above him and not flinching.

‘They don't believe you. They don't think you're strong enough, but I know you are.'

Oisín tried to catch Sorcha's eyes, but they were somewhere far away. The sword hung heavy in her hands. Oisín felt the weight of the Book of Magic in his own hands, its black lines pulsing in anticipation. He didn't have any choice.

‘Don't do it,' Stephen repeated.

Oisín could barely hear him. Words were whirling in his head.
Remember your name. Oisín the little deer, Oisín the gentle
. Granny Keane's voice mixed in with Cassandra Quicksilver's.
The dearest of the deer will be lost. What would be kept must be given away
.

Oisín picked up the pen and started to write. The inscription he had read in Granny Keane's study started to disappear as the Book got a new Keeper. The Morrígan's eyes gleamed in triumph. She held out her palm. The Book of Magic floated to her, a child running over to its mother. The Morrígan clasped it in her pale hands and almost purred with satisfaction. She turned to Sorcha.

‘Now, sweetie, why don't we do what we talked about?'

‘I gave you the Book,' Oisín shouted, desperate.

‘Do it,' the Morrígan commanded.

Stephen looked into Oisín's eyes before his own closed. Sorcha raised the sword high in the air and drove down An Freagarach with all of her strength.

Chapter 23

Into the Book

O
ISÍN turned away as Sorcha raised the sword. He couldn't bear to watch. Instead, he found himself gazing into the Morrígan's triumphant green eyes. She had the Book of Magic. She had twisted Sorcha's mind. She had won.

Then the terrible smile on her face switched. Her beautiful face made more sense when she was angry – it finally matched her eyes. Oisín allowed himself to turn around and saw what had made her furious: instead of killing Stephen, Sorcha had freed him. She held up An Freagarach proudly, threads of sliced cobweb dangling from its blade.

Sorcha turned to the Morrígan and said in a steely voice, ‘I knew my brothers would come. Sweetie.'

The Morrígan didn't just look furious, she looked suddenly lonely. She grasped the Book and flicked to the inscription.

‘You dare to resist the Keeper of the Book of Magic?'

It happened again, the same twist that turned her cruel smile into something worse. Where the inscription had once read:
For Oisín Keane, the Keeper of the Book of Magic
, it now read:
For everyone, the Keepers of the Book of Magic
.

The Morrígan stared at the Book, horrified. She didn't notice Stephen moving stealthily around the room, cutting the cobwebs that bound the other children. She didn't notice Caoimhe running over to Ben Washington and pressing ashgrass into his chest. She had eyes only for the Book.

‘The Book has been with me too long,' she said grimly, plucking a feather from her cloak. ‘It will do what I want.'

She pressed her quill into the Book and Oisín saw a familiar thin black line cobwebbing across a page. From the corner of his eye, Oisín could see Stephen edging closer with An Freagarach, Antimony loading her slingshot, Lysander coiling his tie. He ignored them all and faced the Morrígan.

‘You're wrong,' he said. ‘The Book isn't good or evil. It's how you read it that matters.'

‘Or how you write it,' she said with a smile, stabbing her feather into the parchment.

Oisín couldn't help recoiling as the Book of Magic shook. He still felt attached to it, as if an invisible string ran between them. The Morrígan was right. If she continued to write on the Book, she would be able to control it.

At the moment, though, it wasn't the Morrígan who was controlling the Book of Magic. Silver sparks shot out of a calculator on the ground and the small book slowly increased in size. It must have dropped out of Brad's pocket when he had attacked the Morrígan. Oisín picked it up and realised what had happened. Brad had been pointing the calculator at the Book earlier, trying to increase its size. It hadn't worked because Oisín had been the book's Keeper. Now that
everybody
was the Book's Keeper, the calculator's magic was taking hold and the Book was growing as surely as the tiny spider had.

Soon the small book was the size of Granny Keane's volume of Shakespeare. Moments later it was too large for the Morrígan to hold. The Book kept growing, stretching across the chamber of skulls until each letter was almost as large as Oisín. Oisín scrambled on top of its pages, before he was buried underneath.

Stephen gripped An Freagarach, irritated.

‘I almost had her,' he grumbled.

In the chaos, the Morrígan had run off into a different part of the Book. Oisín surveyed the landscape. It wasn't only the dimensions of the Book that had changed, but those of the whole chamber, as if Cnoc na gCnámh had been waiting for this moment. Oisín felt as if he had been suddenly transported to the ocean. All he could see for miles was the same scenery: gleaming walls of bone and a floor of creamy parchment.

‘The idiot didn't know what he was doing,' Raqib said. ‘You can't mess with magical mathematics in a space like this. It wasn't even his
croíacht
. Who knows what's going to happen? Ben, do something!'

‘He's barely breathing,' Caoimhe said, continuing to push ashgrass onto Ben's wound.

‘It's OK,' Lysander said. ‘I don't think the magic can last that long, not without anybody controlling it. And it might actually help us.'

He pulled out his own
croíacht
, a silver watch, and addressed it grandly.

‘
Stylus.
'

The many hands of Lysander's watch started to lengthen, branching off in several directions. Lysander picked one off and hurled it to Oisín.

‘
Eloquentia sagitta
,' Lysander said with a smile. ‘Or, as you might say, the pen is mightier than the sword.'

Oisín looked at the bottom of the watch hand and saw that it had a nib. Lysander picked up his own pen and pressed it into the parchment. Thin silver writing curled across the pages.

Oisín turned to the others. ‘He's right. All of us are Keepers now. We have to write good magic to stop the Morrígan. The Book of Magic isn't good or evil – it's just the way you write it.'

He guided the pen across the pages as if it were a rake. ‘
Fás
,' he said hopefully, picking the first Earth Magic enchantment that he remembered.

The grass shot up in a sudden burst, peeking out through the pages and stretching to the edges of the Book. The others looked over in amazement. It was the magnifying power of Cnoc na gCnámh: any magic was much bigger than usual. Lysander hurled several large pens, as if they were spears, to the other Wrens.

‘Come on, write,' Oisín cried.

He could hear a rumbling in the distance. The Morrígan wasn't far away.

Tom was the first to start, writing Earth Magic in rich green ink. Caoimhe smudged some of the ashgrass into her own
croíacht
pen and rubbed it across the paper. Grey grass started to grow, sprouting beautiful fire flowers.

‘That's it!' Oisín said, smiling as the Book of Magic was being transformed under his feet. Antimony drew dragons in sparkling orange ink. Raqib wrote the formulae for some of his chemical experiments in tiny red writing. Even Sorcha was writing, dancing across the Book with her pen and using it to cross out the black cracks the Morrígan had made.

‘Watch out!' Oisín cried as one of the cracks started to widen.

Sorcha pirouetted out of the way just in time. It was as if an earthquake was rumbling through the Book. The black lines the Morrígan made stretched towards them terribly, disappearing deep into the crevices of the Book.

That wasn't all the Morrígan had been doing. Oisín turned in horror as he saw the advancing army. It wasn't the ravens in the sky that bothered him. It was the horde of enormous albino spiders, scurrying towards them and stabbing the Book with their legs as they went. They had expanded along with the Book and each of their legs had the same venom as the Morrígan's quill, leaving a spindly black trail on the Book as they shuffled across.

‘Oisín!'

Sorcha grabbed Oisín's hoodie as another large crack opened in the parchment. Oisín was surprised how strong she was. She'd grown up in the month they'd been apart. He supposed that Cnoc na gCnámh could do that to you.

‘Nice work, Sorcha,' Stephen said, patting her on the shoulder. ‘Look after Shortskittles, will you? I've got a job to do.'

Before Oisín could respond, the page they were standing on started to rise as if it was being blown by the wind. Stephen slashed a hole in the parchment and jumped through to the next page. Oisín felt a pang at the Book of Magic being ripped apart. Another page rose and Stephen cut another hole into the Book.

‘She's moving the pages,' Oisín said, starting to understand. ‘She's trying to get to the inscription. She still wants to rewrite it.'

And she still can, Oisín thought with horror. If he had made everybody the Book's Keeper, did that mean that anybody could change it? He grabbed Sorcha's hand and rushed after Stephen, ducking through the tear in the paper as another page furled down. The other Wrens followed them so as not to get squashed under the falling pages, Lysander and Raqib carrying Ben. Before long, they had reached the first page, the one with the inscription on it.

The Morrígan faced them in the distance. Surrounded by her army of ravens and spiders, she had never looked more terrifying.

Oisín struggled to find his feet, feeling sick and dizzy. A tremendous battle was under way. Some of the pictures from the Book had come to life and were fighting the Morrígan's army. Shimmering serpents and bright red birds launched themselves at ravens and spiders. The Morrígan didn't seem to mind when one of her army died. Oisín remembered what Granny Keane had told them: the Morrígan had flown around the old battles of Ireland, cheering both sides on. She didn't care who won or lost so long as she had some bones to bring back to her chamber. Oisín caught sight of Tom befriending some of the spiders and leading them away from the battle. He realised what he had to do.

He ran as quickly as he could. The calculator's magic was wearing off. Slowly, the Book of Magic was returning to its usual size. Oisín leapt across a shrinking crevice and reached the Morrígan. Stephen had just beaten him to it and was duelling the Morrígan with An Freagarach. Even the Morrígan's quill was no match for An Freagarach and it snapped in two. Stephen held out the sword against the Morrígan's neck. She smiled in surprise.

‘You'll do what none of the others could do,' the Morrígan said, a strange expression in her eyes. ‘Ferdia, Naoise, Fionn. None of them managed to kill me. You would be the greatest warrior in Ireland.'

Stephen held the sword steady. He could do it, he told himself. This was the woman who had kidnapped his sister. This was the woman who believed in everything evil. His was the only sword that could kill her. All it would take was one flick of his wrist and she'd be gone for ever. It was that easy.

‘Do it,' the Morrígan said in a soft voice, staring deep into Stephen's eyes.

‘No!'

Stephen turned and looked at his little brother.

‘It's what she wants,' Oisín said.

He understood the way the Morrígan operated now. She existed to inspire violence in others. That was why she encouraged Brad to attack his brother, why she wanted Sorcha to stab Stephen when she could easily have done it herself.

‘All she wants is for people to kill each other,' Oisín said. ‘She just wants death. She doesn't even care if it's her own.'

Stephen's sword quavered.

‘You're going to listen to him?' the Morrígan said in a hard voice. ‘You really think there wouldn't be death if it wasn't for me? All I have to do is whisper in somebody's ear and they'll pick up the knife and plunge it into their parents. That's all I did to Brad Washington. Whispered that he'd never be as good as his brother or the other Quints. Didn't take too long to convince him. All of human life is pain and suffering. I'm the only person who's honest enough to admit it.'

Oisín looked into her eyes without a trace of fear. The words that had been clashing inside of him tumbled out of his mouth.

‘You're wrong. All you see in this world is pain and suffering because that's all you know.'

‘I know you,' she said. ‘You're nothing without the Book.'

‘And I know you. You didn't' have to
pretend
to be the Keeper of Books on
Eachtra
. The truth is you really are a lonely old woman.'

The words were like a slap in the face to the Morrígan. She stepped back from the sword, her beautiful face as pale as bone.

‘I will destroy you,' she said in a voice as cold as any Oisín had ever heard.

Stephen held An Freagarach. Oisín stepped forward. The Morrígan couldn't be beaten with a sword, not really. She'd just shape-shift into a shadow, she'd find another way to spread evil. As long as there were swords being made and people willing to hold them, there would always be ugliness and fighting in the world. Oisín understood: Stephen might kill the Morrígan, but once he had used An Freagarach to kill, he would destroy himself. Oisín took one last step, placed both of his feet in front of the Morrígan and looked up to meet his older brother's stare.

‘Get out of my way,' Stephen said.

‘No,' Oisín said firmly.

Oisín had never really looked into his brother's eyes. Usually Stephen was trying to push him. Usually Oisín was trying to duck. Standing on the Book of Magic, though, as the pages shrank beneath them and ravens flapped above them, both of them stood firm, looking at the stubborn person in front of them. Oisín couldn't say if it lasted a millisecond or a millennium. Then Stephen moved his arm. Instead of pushing Oisín, he let An Freagarach fall to the ground.

That was when the Morrígan laughed, a sound to curdle all hope.

Oisín felt the pain immediately. As Stephen had dropped An Freagarach its tip brushed against Oisín's side. It was the tiniest of touches, but it was enough: the tip of An Freagarach had stopped many a life before. Oisín looked down and saw blood pooling across his green hoodie. He put his hand to his side and found the gash the sword had made. Stephen's eyes filled with horror.

‘I'm fine,' Oisín said, keeping his hands pressed against the seeping wound.

And then everything turned black, the deep black of the bottom of a well, the kind of black that stretched hungrily into for ever.