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those that do must twist themselves into unnatural shapes to manage it at all. If I hadn’t seen the eel-road wriggling through our bottom plot I might think the bog lifeless too.
    But I have seen it, and more.
    The moaney’s a living place all right.
    And anyway, we live here, don’t we?
    The sky up here starts at the ground and you can’t see the finish of it for the life in you. Just lying out under it can do a person three hundred and sixty sorts of good. You fade to a breath under it, uplifted in the songs of woodlark, either in choirs or singular. And the big blue spread of it is like something you could just reach out and touch, but at the same time it’s far, faraway; like another kind of home you can’t quite get to.
    Sometimes it’s like a whole other bog is laid out up there. The clouds pile-up in bleachy dubs and meadows, all white and grey instead of the black and green of our bog. On good days Boson used to say he could see that other moaney clear as day in the skybog pools. He could see me and him, tiny and shining, looking up at our down-turned faces.
    On bad days he wouldn’t look, saying he could see our twinned country down there turning over and over, and it made him sick.

    It was all very well for Ma Slevin to say how strong my brother was in his moony affliction. It wasn’t her that had to keep my brother from towny bile and fists, or keep him from falling into pits — or just from sitting too long with the warblers and forgetting to eat food like a person. It was all very well for her to pat Moo on the back and say it was a bit of a shock at first, she knew, but that soon she’d be proud. All very well to say it wouldn’t surprise her if the other one went his way too.
    I was the other one.
    My mother looked at me like I was a scorpion that reminded her of somebody she knew.
    That night I warned Boson. I tried to be kind. I warned him what folk would say if he tried to tell them about his birdangels.
    ‘It’s true some folk are frighted by what they can’t see for themselves,’ my brother said cheerily.
    ‘No, Bose.’ I sighed. ‘Some folk aren’t frighted by that.
All
folk are.’
    ‘Well I don’t see why they’d be frighted of me.’ He stood on one scrawny leg in the ashes of our hearth, and watched the roof like he was expecting some caller to come that way. He was tucked in some mazy corner of his mind. I felt in my waters that it wasn’t going to end well.
    ‘I’m nobody,’ he told me, contented as could be.
    ‘You’re not nobody. You’re Boson Quirk and my brother,’ I told him but he just swapped legs and smiled. He lifted his throat and shrilled so blade-sharp and carrying I thought they’d hear it down in the Cronks.
    It was a maddened, beaked noise for a boy to make. He shifted from foot-to-foot, slow, lifting each knee belly-high. Then twice he lifted that hard-bent knee right to his chin before stepping back, placing his foot just-so, deft and delicate toe-first down into the dirt.
    Three times he tested these moves of a crane, trembling on his twiggy shanks, and then as my heart sank he rose dancing.
    Those who don’t talk to creatures, who don’t hear music in water and wind, don’t trust those who do. I told him the towns would search him for demons. I told him they’d think his blather ironclad proof that his soul-battle had been wholly lost. Nobody would believe his jaw-flap about angels. They’d just think he was puffing himself up like he thought himself God’s cosset when he was just muddy old Boson Quirk from the bog.
    Or, I told him, they’d think he’d handed himself over bit-by-bit to the Old Enemy.
    It’s not like I didn’t warn him.
    My brother chuckled and whistled all that night after the Slevins went and I lay beside him, listening.
    The house was crammed with Boson. The rest of us stretched in our beds like mists on a bough, or like pictures of people. Only he mattered.
    The next morning came and before the others could wake from