Illyria Read Free

spoken: that he was the most beautiful boy you had ever seen. Or maybe it was only me who felt that. The Tierneys were all tall, and our hair was brown or fair or tawny, and we all had deep-blue eyes. There hadn't been a Tierney with anything but blue eyes in five hundred years, my father said. All of the Tierney boys were handsome in a bluff, cleanshaven Hyannisport way, and most of the girls were pretty.
    Rogan looked like he'd fallen from a painting.
    He was tall like the rest of us, with long legs, long arms, square sturdy hands. His hair was reddish-gold, fine as a baby's hair, and he grew it as long as he could until his father dragged him to the barber up in Getty Square. He had high cheekbones in a feline face--not like a house cat's; more a cougar or lynx, something strong and furtive and quick. His nose was like mine, although it had been broken more than once. His mouth was wide and surprisingly delicate, the only thing about him that might have seemed girlish. Until he smiled, and showed narrow white teeth that were also like an animal's. He had huge, deep-set eyes--wary eyes, which made it slightly alarming when he suddenly turned them on you--and they weren't Tierney blue but a true aquamarine, the palest blue-green, changeable as sea-water in sunlight or cloud.
    But the most striking thing about him was the way he moved. Gracefully--sensually, I would have said if I were older--but also with this strange lightness, almost an unease; as though he had trouble getting his footing. His arms moved as if drawing patterns in the air; he'd tilt his head sometimes like he heard something. Even his furtive gaze wasn't sly but oddly watchful.
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    Yet it wasn't a vigilance that protected him from his brothers or his father, and it was also completely unconscious--I knew because I watched him constantly, had been watching him for as long as I could remember, and maybe for longer.
    Once I eavesdropped, unseen, as Aunt Kate and my mother discussed him. The two of them didn't like each other: my mother was suspicious of her sister-in-law's oddly ageless beauty, her chic black gamine hair and expensive clothes, and, it was whispered, her wealthy lovers.
    "Fey," Aunt Kate said. She twisted her emerald ring as though it hurt her finger. "Rogan's fey." My mother must have made a face, because Aunt Kate went on, annoyed. "That's nor what it means."
    I heard my mother draw on her cigarette. "All I can say is, if I ever had a red-headed child, I'd strangle it."
    Now, watching Rogan, all I wanted to do was touch him. Instead I clutched my own skinny thighs and looked at him sideways, while he held up the match and watched it burn to his fingertips. Finally he tossed the match aside.
    "Listen," he said.
    I cocked my head. "I don't hear anything."
    "No, idiot--listen to me. My voice. Listen to me talking. Talking talking talking. Hear it?"
    I did. "Wow," I said. "It broke!"
    "Yeah. And listen to this--"
    He put his hands on his knees and leaned forward, his face jutting into the darkness until I could no longer see it. He began to sing.
    13
    "When all beside a vigil keep,
    The West's asleep, the West's asleep..."
    My flesh crawled. I knew the song from one of my father's Clancy Brothers records. "The West's Awake."
    "And long a brave and haughty race
    Honoured and sentinelled the place.
    Sing, Oh! not e'en their sons' disgrace
    Can quite destroy their glory's trace..."
    I had never heard it sung like this. I had never heard anything sung like this, or heard a guy's voice remotely sound like this. It wasn't even singing; more a sustained wail, Rogan's mouth somehow shaping words that seemed to claw against the voice that formed them. He was keening, in a tenor so pure and wild and primal that it didn't even sound like music: it was like being burned by a song. It was like hearing something die.
    "But hark] a voice like thunder spake,
    The West's awake! The West's awake..."
    His voice rose to a falsetto, then fell. It held the last notes