“Macdara,” came a whisper, hot breath near Mac’s ear. “Dúisigh!”
It was morning. A bell in the distance. Mac’s body felt stiff, and he could tell by the light that it was later than he usually slept. Rian’s spot under the blanket was cold so he must have been up for a while. Prowling, no doubt. Exploring. Blackguarding, if such a thing was possible on the top of a mountain. If anyone could find trouble, Rian could. Down at the shore the tide would have pushed great knots of seaweed onto the beach and Mac and Rian’s brothers would have been sent to collect it. It was mid-May already. Fair Day was coming up soon and if Mac could figure a way there he’d have a great time, but his bicycle had been broken for weeks.
“Say it in English,” Mac mumbled to his younger brother. He didn’t want to move just yet—he needed a moment—but in those seconds he could feel the heat of Rian’s breath near his face again.
“Dúisigh,” Rian repeated as he shook his brother’s shoulder. It was just the two of them up in the booley house where their mother had slept during summers when she was a girl, back when cattle were driven into the mountains for the seasonal burst of grass. The booley had been neglected for a generation because no one kept more than a few head of cattle anymore, at least not in the Cuan where they were locked between mountains and sea and the only crop that appeared from the soil in abundance were stones. But as a young girl, their mother had stayed up in the booley for a few weeks each summer along with her mother, and her aunts, and all the other womenfolk in other booleys scattered over the mountains because the men couldn’t leave the sea. The small shelter had a packed dirt floor and a ring of stones marking the place to make a fire. The walls were just stands of carefully stacked bog oak built against one of the boulders that made up the landscape of wider Connemara and that Teacher said were all put there by a glacier, somehow. Outside, a battered ash tree gave some protection from the wind.
Rian gave up on Mac and stepped outside. Mac could hear him scrambling in the brush.
“Tar anseo!” he called eventually.
“English!” Mac called back.
