The Lowing

The humans were tired. Tired of swimming for hours on end. Tired of crouching around the holy well.

The heat inside the lighthouse wasn’t helping with that. Smoke puffed out of a chimney that hadn’t seen use for more than twenty years. The smell of burning dust was gone by the time Foggy and the others knocked on the lighthouse’s front door.

Karen answered it.

Karen then screamed and threw herself into Foggy’s arms.

They’d been gone for eight hours somehow. She’d started to get worried. Stomach cramps, swirling thoughts, the whole nine yards. It had only taken about an hour to get the enormous lantern moving again, what with Jack’s lantern experience.

JB was nowhere to be seen.

Karen explained that he’d been coming in and out of the lighthouse. She pulled away from hugging Matt to say that she had gotten the feeling that he wasn’t in much of a talking mood.

“I think he’s hunting,” she said.

Hunting what?

“I don’t know,” Karen said. “But he’ll probably be back soon. He checks in every hour.”

Jack was nowhere to be seen either, but Matt found him anyways. Sister Maggie hung back, wringing out her hair in the lighthouse’s old, dusty kitchen sink.

Foggy didn’t hear Jack’s reaction to the news, but he could imagine it.

Matt didn’t come back down from the lantern platform for a while. When he did come, he settled in on the ground next to Foggy across from the fire and laid his cheek against Foggy’s shoulder.

“Tired?” Foggy asked him.

Matt hummed.

“Happy?” Foggy pressed.

“I can’t remember the path I took,” Matt said.

Hm.

“I’m sure your feet will remember. Bodies do, you know,” Foggy said.

Matt kept his eyes closed.

They could have slept at the lighthouse, but there were no beds. Only emergency supplies. A handful of towels, a bunch of flashlights.

The paint all around the interior was peeling. There were none of the strings of shells that Foggy remembered hanging in swoops from the ceiling. There was no kettle shuddering on the stove or laundry laying half-folded on the couch.

The space felt cavernous and empty without Matt and Jack’s lives tucked into it.

They didn’t stay. Sister Maggie and Jack sent them off back for the village. The tide was low enough to walk over the sandbar now.

It was a long, long journey home, guided by stars, clouds of breath, and red fingers aching with the cold.

Foggy, Matt, and Karen were staying at Nan’s house. It was a ways away from Foggy’s childhood home—a couple of blocks back. The Cap trio were staying further in the hills and were, lucky for them, closer to the last cliff their rag-tag group climbed down from.

They dropped off the Caps and their dog. Sam waved and said to text him in the morning when they were ready to leave.

Karen promised that they would.

And then they carried on.

“What if I don’t remember?” Matt asked Foggy as he came out of the ensuite bathroom at Nan’s old house with a cloud of steam.

Foggy combed hands through his hair. He came over to sit down next to Matt on the bed. Matt didn’t move to make room for him, he wanted Foggy to be as close as possible.

“You’ll remember,” Foggy told him. “I’ll help you.”

“You weren’t with me,” Matt said sadly. “Mum was, then no one was until the end.”

Foggy eased him down onto the mattress and pulled the duvet over them both. It was packed with down feathers. Heavy. Matt curled into his chest with cold fingertips.

“You’re not alone, Matty,” Foggy said.

“I didn’t have the stick with me that time,” Matt said with his face pressed into Foggy’s collarbone.

“You aren’t alone.”

“It’s silly to be nervous, isn’t it?”

No.

No, not at all.

“What if—what if it doesn’t fit? When I get it back, I mean. What if it doesn’t fit? What if I can’t swim? What if I forgot how, Fogs? What if I forgot how to breathe and—”

“Matt.”

Matt fell quiet. Foggy laid his head heavily against his.

“You’re Daredevil, Matt,” Foggy said. “These things don’t scare you.”

Matt breathed hot against his skin.

“I’m not scared,” he said.

“You’re not scared,” Foggy repeated.

“I’m not scared.”

“You’re not alone,” Foggy promised.

“I’m not alone,” Matt said. “I’m not scared. And I’m not alone.”

“You can do this,” Foggy told him.

“I can do this,” Matt agreed.

Foggy flicked his eyes up and over to the chair sat next to the other side of the bed. It was full of a tangle of jackets. Matt’s lute laid across its arms; in its shadow was Foggy’s tambourine.

He closed his eyes.

“Lights out, big guy,” he said. “My bones are tired.”

Foggy woke up to a knock on the door. He sat up and blinked blearily.

“Wha’s’at?” he slurred.

“Coffee,” Karen whined through the door.

Ah.

“Left of the stove,” Foggy said.

A mumbled thanks bounced against the door and Karen’s drunk-zombie shuffle left for the kitchen. Matt sneezed under the duvet.

“Morning sunshine,” Foggy yawned. “Ready to face the day?”

Matt sniffed and made no attempt to emerge from his warm, happy den.

Typical.

Their firm was a collective night owl. The fact that any of the three of them got to the office before 10am on any given day was a goddamned miracle. They made it work, usually, by bribing themselves with coffee and leaving the good stuff at the office for Karen not to fucking touch, ever.

This woman burned coffee like a vengeful barista.

Matt brought the duvet with him into the living room and informed any footsteps that passed him that he wasn’t asleep. Karen sat on him with her mug of joe in hand and waited patiently while Foggy made two more in the other room.

“You’re lumpy,” she told Matt’s duvet-ed ass.

“Tha’s m’ name,” Matt mumbled.

“Lumpy?”

“Mm.”

Foggy entered the room with coffee.

They decided to text the Caps on the second cup. The reply that Foggy got was a keyboard smash and then a smattering of words that promised a semblance of wakefulness.

Sam asked if where he could buy ibuprofen. It took him three times to spell the word.

Foggy told him that there was a chemist in town and that they could pick some up for him before they got breakfast at the café next to it.

“What the fuck is a chemist?” Sam texted back.

“An apothecary,” Karen announced, pointing at the green cross over her head.

“Chemist,” Foggy corrected.

“Apothecary. It’s an apothecary,” Karen insisted. “It’s green.”

“It’s a pharmacy at the most,” Foggy told her. Inside, Sam was making confused faces at the wall of colorful boxes. Steve was marveling the rack of novelty umbrellas by the entrance.

“Drug home,” Karen decided.

“Alright, I’ll give you that,” Foggy told her. Matt snapped awake when his cheek slid off his shoulder. Foggy let him wipe at his face in peace.

They got breakfast at Flora’s. It was a nice café, nothing fancy. Mostly it housed a lot of bread covered in whatever protein or condiment you wanted, but damn was it good bread.

“Can you remember where you started off at least?” Steve asked Matt over a cup of steaming tea. Foggy would have thought he’d have opted for coffee.

“It’s hard,” Matt said. “It’s all kind of a mess. I was only eight years old.”

Steve winced in sympathy.

“All I remember of eight was gettin’ slugged in the face by Phil Goldberg,” he said. “You remember Phil, Buck?”

JB made a sleepy, inquisitive sound.

“With the ears,” Steve clarified.

“Did I bite this guy?” JB asked.

“That’s the one,” Steve said.

Sam grimaced at JB.

“We needa get you shots,” he said.

“Fucker earned it,” JB sniffed.

“Y’all were eight,” Sam said.

“I said what I said,” JB maintained. He stuffed half of a piece of toast in his mouth and stole a sip from Sam’s coffee mug.

Matt wracked his brains over breakfast, trying to remember where his ordeal had started. It hadn’t been Foggy who he’d met first. When he’d arrived on the island, he said, there had been something else.

“Mum wouldn’t let me in the water,” he said. “She kept tellin’ Dad not to let me out of the lighthouse for some reason. I can’t—I can’t remember why, though.”

“Why don’t we ask Sister Margaret, then?” Sam said. “She’d know, right?”

Matt sighed.

The church in town was down by the docks. It was grey and built out of gritty old stone. Foggy remembered it being taller. He always remembered it being taller than it was. Matt and Steve and Sam went inside to see if they could find the Sister. Foggy, Karen, and JB hung back.

“The first time I felt Matt in this place, I was so confused,” Foggy told Karen. “I thought they were trying to kill him.”

Karen snickered.

“Do selkies not have religion?” she asked.

Foggy frowned.

“Define religion,” he said.

“Define religion?” JB said. “What, like, in one fell swoop? You can’t just define religion, bub.”

Foggy pursed his lips at him.

“Like, beliefs,” Karen tried anyways. “Maybe with rituals?”

“Then yes,” Foggy said, still challenging JB. “We have religion. We are religion.”

“We ain’t religion,” JB maintained.

“It’s hard to explain,” Foggy relented to Karen. “We’re kinda stuck in between.”

“No, no. I feel that,” Karen said. She looked up at the stone cross hanging over their heads. Beads of water hung from the gravelly stone.

Sister Maggie stood under the stone cross and said that the first thing that she’d done upon reaching the island was mark Matt with a cloaking spell.

She hadn’t wanted anyone to know he was there so that she could make sure that the waters around the lighthouse were safe. It made a whole lot of sense now why Foggy hadn’t been able to track Matt back then until they’d met on the docks. That had been days after Matt and Jack had moved to the island. Foggy should have been able to sense him right away.

“We couldn’t let you out onto proper soil under the spell took effect. You don’t remember Jack blocking you inside?” Sister Maggie asked Matt with a threatening smile. “You weren’t happy about it. I have it on good word that there were multiple escape attempts.”

“I just remember being tired,” Matt said.

“Yes, well. That was the jet lag,” Sister Maggie said with a shrug. “Certainly worked out in our favor that time. No, we marked you with hazel ash and kept you indoors for the first day. Gave me time to map out the cove.”

Matt frowned hard trying to remember.

“It’s alright, I wouldn’t have expected you to remember,” Sister Maggie said.

“So I’ve got to find hazel,” Matt translated.

“Hazel first,” Sister Maggie agreed. “Then to the bay and then the mountain.”

Matt nodded, seeming to remember better now.

“Hazel, then to the bay, then forest, then mountain,” he said.

Sister Maggie lifted an eyebrow.

“I remember now,” Matt said. “Dad took me to a forest and I got stuck in a tree.”

Sister Maggie hummed the hum of someone about to go back and have a conversation with their significant other.

“Not my forest, then,” she said. “There’s another one lower down on the other side of the village. You know which one I’m talking about, Franklin? You can probably get the hazel and that forest in the same go since we’re already close to the bay. Just go past the convent before going up to the mountain.”

That seemed fair.

“Go on then,” Sister Maggie said. “Although, you three had better start following the violets.”

Steve pointed at himself. Sister Maggie nodded.

“The hounds that walk this island have preferred trails. They mark them with dog violets,” she said. “If Manannán’s hound came to shore on its own, then it probably started off along one of those paths. You’re in luck; we’re here in early spring. The early variety has already started blooming. Follow them and they might lead you to the hound.”

Steve tipped his head to the side.

“Sounds easy enough,” he said.

The corner of Sister Maggie’s mouth flickered.

“If I were you, I’d keep those words inside,” she said. “And if I were you, I’d take some matches.”

“Matches?” Sam repeated.

“Well, yes,” Sister Maggie said. “Spirit hounds prefer to hunt in the dark.”

Steve winced.

“Duly noted,” he said. “Where do we buy matches?”

Matt turned their way with high eyebrows.

They sent the Caps off to go collect Peter and his sentient match. Matt thanked his mother. They left the church on the hunt for hazel.

There was a little messy grove of trees on the other side of the village. Foggy knew it because, as a youth, he and his classmates used to dare each other to go into it and call its boggart’s name.

Her name was Jane. She was English, brought to their village in the 17^th century by travelers, or so the legends said.

One time, Foggy had gone into the woods by himself on the hunt for Jane and her ‘rotten, cotton, white gown.’ (Oh, weren’t rhyming games fun.) But he’d found no boggarts. He’d only found bones—old bones. They were tangled in the dirt and roots of a huge snowberry bush. It only made sense, Foggy had figured, that a disintegrating skull feed the shrub that fed the eventual Death’s Head Hawk moths.

He hadn’t seen any floating about in that wet wood at the time, but he had no doubt that they eventually made their way back to visit their mother.

Karen led the way into the wood. Matt held Foggy’s elbow and twisted his head around, listening.

Matt said that he remembered this place. He remembered Jack lifting him up to let him put his hands into a hollowed out stump filled with water. He remembered its mouth being coated with soft moss.

Foggy knew which stumps he was talking about.

There had once been two twin trees in the wood. They’d been huge. Heavy.

They had been horse chestnut trees and when Foggy was just a few weeks out of molting his soft fluffy pup pelt, Dad had bought him to the trees to leave an offering at their bases for good health and protection. Foggy could remember picking up the spiky outer-layers of the nuts and Dad taking them out of his chubby hands before hauling him up into his arms to stop him from trying to stab himself with them.

The trees had cracked badly in a storm that same year. The local council sent some people out to cut them down before any dog walkers got hurt.

That had been right before Mom had come into their lives.

Foggy wondered what Matt had been doing at the time in New York.

Probably trying to climb out a fire-escape window. That sounded like something baby Matt would do.

He told Karen to keep right up ahead.

The twin stumps were still there. Around twenty-five years dead, but still making their presence known.

Over time, they would start to sink, Foggy suspected as he peered into the foot-deep pool of water in the first of them.

They would sink and sink and take their water with them until they sunk into the earth and became holy wells.

Matt scraped fingers around the softened, rotten bark that surrounded the pool. He paused, confused by the little ferns that sprung out from the moss.

“It felt bigger when I was a kid,” he said.

Foggy got that. Everything did.

“Is there a circle near here?” Matt asked him.

There had to be.

“If there is, we should tell Karen about the boggart to keep her the fuck away from it,” Foggy murmured.

Matt smiled and crinkled his nose at him in understanding.

“Hey Kare?” Foggy called into the cluster of trees between the two paths ahead.

“Sup?” Karen asked, swinging her bag around and then her body after it. She was mid-climb, unaware of all the water her chosen victim was about to dump on her head in retaliation.

“Can you do me a favor?” Foggy asked.

“Sure thing, name it,” Karen said.

Karen was now on the hunt for Miss Jane Thorn. Foggy sent her purposefully down the wrong path with instructions to be on the lookout for snowberries. He did not describe what they were for her. She saluted and jetted off like a champ.

“I love her,” Foggy told Matt as they stepped off-trail on the opposite path.

“She’s pretty great,” Matt agreed.

“When we get out, we should tell her not to go looking for boggarts,” Foggy said.

“Ehn. They’re more English than Irish. She should be fine,” Matt said.

Hazel grew in stringy bunches. It was a good wood for building fences and weaving baskets and its nuts, the stories said, had fed the Salmon of Knowledge its wisdom before it had been eaten by Fionn Mac Cumhail in turn.

It was a valuable plant to human and fae alike.

The circle Matt and Foggy found of it was tangled with patches of knotweed. Matt sneezed while he tried to break off some branches from in between the weed.

They didn’t need much.

The green hazel wood would smoke something awful and getting it to catch would be a pain in the ass. It would be easier to build a fire and scorch the hazel enough to get some char on it than it would be to reduce all this wet wood to ash.

Foggy found the remnants of a dry stone wall buried under a tangle of brambles. It took some picking and a few little knicks, but he managed to wriggle out an armful of the flatter, drier pieces hiding in the middle of it.

He brought these back to Matt and his handful of torn, splitting branches.

“This is probably enough, yeah?” Matt asked him.

Yeah, probably.

“You got a light?” Foggy asked him.

He did.

Foggy arranged the stones and he and Matt went to dig under the brambles for some of the more dry sticks and leaves that had had the fortune of getting stuck under it in the fall.

They scorched the hazel. Karen was deep enough into the woods that she probably couldn’t see the smoke. They’d put it out soon anyways. Hopefully no one would come around asking too many questions.

“Come here,” Foggy said to Matt, rubbing his thumb against the hot exterior of one of the partially burned sticks.

Matt came closer and took off his glasses.

“Close your eyes,” Foggy said.

Matt did.

Foggy pressed a blackened thumb against the center of his forehand and then had him lift his chin to get another mark at the top of his throat.

“Be you silent to ears and eyes,” he whispered.

“Be you nought more than whispers,” Matt whispered back.

The chirping of birds and the tapping of water hitting the soaked wood floor seemed to fade off into nothing.

“It’s done,” Foggy said. “Step one, accomplished.”

“How long will it last?” Matt asked.

“Not long,” Foggy told him. “It only hides you within a few miles of the place that you cast it. Come on, let’s go scare the shit out of Karen.”

Karen did not think their joke was funny. She punched Foggy in the arm and gave him all kinds of hell for having lost their only blind team member. Then she beat the shit out of Matt’s arms when he reappeared next to her halfway to back to the bay.

While Matt was being assaulted, Foggy checked his phone and found Sam’s reaction to finding out just who Peter’s fire was waiting for him there in text message form.

Sam had called Johnny’s sister right then and there.

Steve was apparently having an existential crisis, thinking that he could no longer tell which people in New York were mutants and which were fae.

And JB, naturally, was bullying the fire.

It sounded like their quest was off to a great start.

They regrouped for lunch down by the harbor. Steve had in his hands a field guide of native plants from the town’s bookshop. Peter and Johnny were too bright and energetic to look at.

Foggy gathered through Peter’s nattering that he and Johnny had been trapped inside for the last day by the abominable Mrs. Doyle.

“She hates me,” Peter told Foggy. “She think’s I’m ‘bothersome.’”

“Me too,” Johnny reported. “She bound me to a stool.”

“And she made me read all day,” Peter added. “She quizzed me on every paragraph.”

This all sounded pretty much exactly like what Foggy expected from the old witch.

“So we’re getting mixed messages here,” Sam reported over those two’s complaining. “The Sister, obviously, is telling us to follow dog violets, but some rando just popped out of the back of the bookstore and told Buck that we ought to be chasing dog-rose? Not violet? But Steve’s book there says that dog rose doesn’t blossom for months yet. So which is it, rose or violet?”

Foggy scoffed.

Matt hummed.

“Violet,” he said. “You’re getting jerked around by a pixie.”

Sam stared at him blankly. Matt didn’t pick up on his confusion.

“A pixie,” Foggy repeated. “His name’s Dalaigh—he chases after the book-keeper, pretending to be a clerk and whatever. Has done ever since the old man slammed the door in his face nearly twelve years ago. Anyways, you can’t trust him for shit. He’s always leading the villagers astray.”

Sam processed that while staring out at the harbor.

“How the hell does anyone get anything done in this place?” he asked miserably.

Foggy shrugged.

“Not a whole lot of visitors,” he said. “We just get used to it.”

Peter and Johnny didn’t want to go follow no stinkin’ violets. They wanted to come with Matt, Foggy, and Karen to the mountain.

“No can do,” Foggy told them. “Dogs like the forest and plains.”

“But we want to help,” Peter moaned. Johnny looked between him and Cap next to him a couple of times.

Johnny was fascinated with Steve.

Johnny could have been Steve’s own son if you weren’t looking too hard. All blond hair and blue eyes and gangly limbs that would almost certainly thicken and broaden with age.

“I don’t like the mountain,” Johnny told Peter. “It feels weird.”

Peter squinted at him.

“You think Mrs. Doyle’s bathtub feels weird,” he accused.

“That’s ‘cause its blue,” Johnny said. “Who paints their bath blue?”

“It’s tile, Johnny, it’s not painted,” Peter said.

“Alright, fine. Who tiles their bathtub blue—actually, who tiles a bath to begin with?”

Mrs. Doyle. That’s who.

Peter rolled his eyes, then wrapped himself around Matt’s chest and whined until Matt laughed at him. Matt extricated him and pushed him over in JB’s direction.

“You’re obsessed with dogs, Pete,” he said. “You should be lovin’ this.”  

Peter huffed.

“I signed up to help you,” he said. “Not these guys.”

Steve lifted an eyebrow at him.

“By helping them, you are helping me,” Matt said indulgently. “Just go with it, yeah?”

“You’re talking more like Foggy,” Peter pouted.

It took Foggy a moment to realize that he was referring to Matt’s shifting accent. Matt shrugged.

“It happens,” he said. “Why don’t we do this? We’ve all got to start at the bottom of the mountain. There’s a woodland there where dog violets like to grow. We can all start at the same place and then break off. Is that fair?”

Peter considered it.

“Can I come with you guys?” he asked. “Johnny can go with Cap and Mr. Wilson.”

Johnny went from staring up at Steve in wonder to rapt attention. The horror on this kid’s face.

“You’re leaving me?” he asked.

Aw, baby no. Everything’s okay.

“Peter, you’re leaving?”

JB paused in his plotting to look alarmed at Johnny’s tone.

“No one’s leaving anyone,” Sam said. “Peter, hon. I know you wanna help your friend, but they’ve gotta do what they’ve gotta do. So you’re coming with us, okay?”

Peter sighed and relented. Johnny came in close to him and threaded an unsure arm through his. Peter leaned against him.

“Finish your lunch,” Matt said, reaching over and ruffling Peter’s hair.