The O’Neill Banshee

There are banshees who howl like broken weather and banshees who keen like a thread drawn through cloth. The O’Neills knew theirs by the latter sound—a soft lament that ran under the wind like a river under ice.

On the night the old lord took to his bed, a milk-grey mist wandered up from the fields and a hawthorn at the gate grew suddenly white with bloom though it was not spring. The keen began just before the lamps were lit: three notes and a fall, three notes and a fall, as if someone were teaching sorrow to count.

Inside, the youngest daughter, Áine, sat with her father and wet his lips with rainwater. “Do you hear it?” she asked.

“I do,” said the old man, “and I am not afraid. A house that is loved is warned.”

Servants crossed themselves; a hound crept under the table; a scullery boy hid in the flour bin and sneezed himself white. The keen did not grow louder or nearer; it kept its distance as courtesy keeps distance at a wake.

Áine went to the gate. There she saw the banshee.

She was not a tangle-haired terror but a small woman in a grey mantle, her face pale as the inside of a shell. She stood beside the hawthorn, a hand on the trunk, her mouth shaping the old notes that pulled the sting from grief by naming it.

“Lady,” said Áine, for grief levels all titles, “will it be tonight?”

The banshee lowered her hand. “Soon,” she said, and the word was as gentle as warm bread.

“Will there be pain?”

“Little. He is sung for.” She looked toward the house with eyes that were more spring-water than sorrow. “I keened for his mother and his mother’s mother. Tell him the way is clear.”

Áine bowed—not out of fear but because there are courtesies that oil the hinges of the world. “Will you have a sip of milk?” she asked, remembering her nurse’s tales. The banshee smiled, not with her mouth but with the less visible part of a face that has wept long and well.

“I am served,” she said, and turned to the hawthorn again.

When the old lord’s breath thinned to a thread, the keen lifted and carried it. He went easy as a leaf, and the house was quiet with the good quiet that follows a storm that did not break the roof.

In the morning the mist had gone and the hawthorn’s blossoms were only dew. People speak idly of banshees as if they were curses. The O’Neills speak of theirs as they would speak of a midwife. There are worse things than being ushered from one room to the next by someone who knows the door.