Riley

Prologue

THE LIGHTS IN THE SMALL bedroom had been put out a half hour before, but the three brothers were too occupied with the raging storm outside than with falling asleep. Riley Quinn sat at the window, watching as the rain slashed against the glass. The rosebushes in the garden were bent so low by the wind coming off the sea that they touched the ground.

“Jaysus, it’s bucketing out there,” Riley said. “Noah and his ark will be floating by any second now.”

“Do you think this is like the storm that made Ma fall in love with Da?” Danny asked.

Daniel, the youngest of the three Quinn brothers, sat in the center of his bed, the covers pulled up to his chin. The eight-year-old had an imagination that never seemed to stop. He could see dragons and sea serpents wherever he looked and though he was a bit of a baby, Riley was beginning to like him more as he got older. Danny could fashion all sorts of wild things, using his little pocketknife to carve monsters and ogres and bloodthirsty insects. His rucksack was always filled with blocks of wood and bars of soap, just in case he imagined something to make.

“I suppose it was,” Riley said, plopping down on the bed next to him. “Da said it was blowing so hard he couldn’t stand up straight.”

“Do you think our ma was selkie, like da says she was?”

“No,” Riley said. His father had always been fond of telling fanciful tales of the night he’d met their mother. “And she wasn’t a mermaid or a faerie, either. She was just our ma, only younger.”

Riley missed those bedtime stories, filled with characters from Irish myths and legends. There had been time for them back when life was much different around the Quinn house. Before his father had been sacked from his job, before he’d decided to buy in to the Speckled Hound, an old pub in Ballykirk.

Long hours serving the local crowd and occasional tourists meant that Eamon and Maggie Quinn were never home to put their boys to bed. Riley’s older sisters, Shanna and Claire, did all the cooking and cleaning around the small white-washed cottage. The boys took care of the garden and milked the cow and tended the chickens they kept.

“We should go out there,” Riley said. “Let’s see if the wind will knock us down like it did to Da.”

“Will you two just lay off and go to sleep?” Kellan looked over from the book he was reading. “Blathering about the weather isn’t going to change it. And if you go out there Da will whip your arse until you can’t sit down.”

Kellan was the eldest, and the most clever of the three. At age twelve, Kellan was almost a teenager and Riley and Danny usually deferred to him. But Kell had been a real puss-face lately. All he seemed to care about was school and exams and making his grades.

“Piss off,” Riley muttered. “This is our room, too, and we can talk as long as we want.”

Riley had never been much concerned about his schoolwork. Except when the music teacher, the beautiful Miss Delaney, came round to their room. He loved to sing and the days she brought instruments along, he was always the first to try them, able to play by ear in a matter of minutes.

She’d even lent him a fiddle, which he’d been teaching himself how to play, and she’d promised to bring a guitar once he’d mastered three tunes. But what he truly loved was the songs she taught-old Irish songs, children’s songs and ballads and pub tunes. And then, she’d sing in the simple and sweet style called Sean Nós, her beautiful, clear voice ringing through the room, unaccompanied by instruments.

“Listen to that,” he said, leaning closer to the window. “The storm is singing.” He hummed along with the sound, then added words to the tune.

The only good that had come out of his parents’ work at the Hound was that the five Quinn children were expected to help out on the weekends, which was when the pub hosted local musicians. Rather than dragging his feet to work, Riley arrived early so he could finish his tasks in time to sit in a dark corner of the pub and listen to the music.

Riley pushed away from the window and crawled into the bed he shared with Danny. “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “The storm can’t get us.”

“Sing me a song,” Danny said, snuggling beneath the worn bedspread.

“What do you want to hear?” Riley asked.

“The barley song. I like that one.”

“‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley,’ it’s called.” Riley sang the song softly. “‘I sat within a valley green, I sat me with my true love. My sad heart strove to choose between, the old love and the new love.’”

“Why are there always girls in the songs?” Danny interrupted.

“I guess people like to hear about love,” Riley said. He really didn’t understand it, either. He would have preferred songs about battles or murder or even aliens. But most of the songs he knew were about love and sadness. And someone was always dying. “Da says if you can sing a sad tune, the lassies will love you.”

“Go to sleep!” Kellan shouted.

“Feck off!” Riley and Danny said simultaneously. They started to laugh, then pulled the bedcovers over their heads.

“Stupid gits,” Riley whispered.

“Sing the rest of the song,” Danny begged.

Riley continued, the sound of the wind and rain his only accompaniment. He couldn’t help but wonder if he’d ever like a girl enough to sing her a song. And if he did, would she follow him around the same way the girls followed Kellan?

Love was much easier to understand when it was words in a song than when it happened in real life.