The Iron Tree: Book One of The Crowthistle Chronicles

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  Our hearts are sore.

  “Released from hurt and suffering,

  You travel on your way. We who

  Remain alone are sorrowing,

  And missing you.

  “Farewell! Now you have gone before

  To rest where there is no more pain,

  But maybe far beyond the shore

  We’ll meet again.

  “Let pearly water lilies crowd

  Above your final resting place:

  A beautiful and tranquil shroud

  Of living lace.

  “Sun’s heat and rainfall formed each flower

  And everything that ever grew.

  Both fire and water can devour;

  Both can renew.”

  Night enclosed the marsh like a cavern, its walls encrusted with diamonds. Yet the darkness was illumined by a flare. On the black expanse of Charnel Mere floated the very heart of the sun, imprinting ghostly images on the backs of the audience’s eyes. Around the shores of the lake, crowds of people were singing. Five boats lay at anchor around the bonfire, at a safe distance from the heat and sparks: ceremonial boats of the watch. In one vessel stood the household of Earnán Mosswell. As the pyre flung its glory of sparks and flames to the stars, the four mourners cast flowers on the opaque waters of Charnel Mere, and the waters flung back their reflections, like wraiths.

  “I only wish I could see her again. Do wraiths exist?” Lilith asked Eolacha, forcing the words past the clamp of agony in her throat. “Is it possible for the spirits of the dead to walk in the world? I have always believed it a lie. I wish to change my mind but can find no grounds to do so.”

  “In my younger days,” said the carlin, leaning heavily on her Wand for support, “I would have said you were right to give no credit to rumors of shades. However, when I grew older, my father told me a story. Late one night he was going along a seldom-used path way out in West-Marsh, and he thought he saw a dim figure gliding in front of him. He stopped and gaped in wonder, for he could see right through it. It was obviously no eldritch wight. The figure was that of a man, and as my father watched, he paused suddenly, and beyond him was another man the same age, and that one running joyously. The first swept his arms wide and the second came swiftly to meet him, and they threw their arms about each other and the two of them remained in a close embrace for a moment. Then they walked away together, vanishing, as it seemed, across the water and into the reeds. My father said he was left with a feeling he could hardly describe. It was terrible joy and sweet heartbreak, a pain most bittersweet and profound. He could never explain what he saw, or whether he was sleeping or waking, but when eventually he told others what he had seen, one oldster spoke up and said that many years ago twin brothers had been drowned at that place, and the most beauteous flowers grew there, that were seen nowhere else in the marsh, yet folk feared to go there and some that had passed that way were seized with a wonder and a dread and an exultation that surely came from somewhere beyond our knowledge, if not from beyond the grave.”

  “But were they truly wraiths?”

  “The knowledge is not at me. I can only conjecture. It might be that when emotional attachment is extraordinarily strong, it cannot be erased from the energy of the world and remains forever with us in one form or another. Perhaps, if living beings are sensitive, they might perceive these enduring energies.”

  Yearning for some hope of comfort, no matter how fragile, Lilith forced the words from her throat, though they threatened to strangle her. “But how should such insubstantialities obtain a shape?”

  “Again, child, I can only conjecture. Conceivably they are given form either by the dreams of those who perceive them or by the memories of the dead themselves.” The old carlin bowed her head. “Believe or not, as you will. It is a mystery; that is all I can say.”

  The next day dawned clear and fair. Lilith took the small coracle and went alone to Marsh’s Edge. To the door of her grandfather’s cot she came.

  She anticipated these regular visits with apprehension. It upset her to be forced to witness the old man’s suffering and to be virtually helpless to alleviate it. On this occasion she was also bowed down by grief. The death of Liadán had shattered her world. Throughout her entire life her mother had stood figuratively and literally at her side, a bulwark against uncertainty, a barrier against life’s more brutal knocks, a guardian, it seemed, against death. Now that she had gone, Lilith felt vulnerable, as if the guardian had fallen in battle, leaving the path open for death to claim her next. And as a prelude to death—what? Was it possible death employed a herald?

  Lilith did not knock—such sounds were wont to terrify her grandfather. Instead, she softly called his name. He came to the door, a shabby, lank-haired husk of a man, his scrawny neck hung about with dozens of amulets. Dark crescents arced beneath his sunken eyes, and his jaw trembled. His eyes rattled around in his head like marbles.

  “Who’s there? Who’s there?” he shrieked thinly.

  “Grandfather, it is I, Lilith.”

  The old man’s head darted from right to left as if he feared peril was nigh. “Trip, trip, trip,” he said. “They say the conger is a candlemaker’s daughter. If you stop breathing, they can’t hear you. Sessa! What’s that?”

  Lilith clasped her hands so tightly together, she felt the blood stop. She knew then that she could not tell this pathetic wreck about the demise of his daughter. He suffered enough already. In any case, it was unlikely he would understand.

  “’Tis bread I have brought for you,” she said, sliding the basket from her elbow.

  “Oh, ah,” said her grandfather, backing into his hovel, “’tis a fair day for picnicking, but the moon’s in the nest.”

  Lilith swept crumbs from the table and arranged her gifts thereon. “There’s bread,” she said, endeavoring to appear cheerful, “ale and pickles, cheese and smoked eels. Look, here is a grand treat—a smidgin of honey.” She set the tiny honey pot on the boards. “Eoin found a hive on Toadflax Island.”

  “Odds fish!” exclaimed her grandfather. “Trip, trip, trip, will it never leave me alone? I was a champion sprinter in my day.” He gazed distractedly at her offerings. She wondered if he saw them. Restlessly he paced in small circles. She noted that his pallet had been overturned; his bedclothes were spread out over the floor.

  “Have you slept, Grandfather?” she asked gently. “I will be setting your bed to rights.”

  “No, no!” he shrilled. “Don’t meddle with wickedness!”

  She was taken aback. “I will not be touching it if you wish,” she said, “but ’tis only a bed.”

  He drew close. His breath was foul and his body stank, yet Lilith did not recoil. An ache gnawed in her chest: she recalled what a fine, merry man he had been long ago when he dandled her on his knee.

  “Do not approach it,” he whispered in her ear. “They come, they come.”

  She could not speak. Her heart jammed.

  “It follows,” he murmured. “The imprints show in moss or mud, or wet on the floor. Look there!” His finger jabbed toward the floorboards. “And there! It follows. Can you hear? Trip, trip, trip. It finds us out, no matter where we hide. Every year, closer. It will catch me soon, oh yes. Now only an arm’s length. Once, many paces away. A long time ago, very distant. Can you credit it, my dear? Never sleep!”

  Lilith shuddered. With a great effort, she mastered her dread and poured some ale.

  “Drink,” she said, offering him the cup. He accepted it, swallowing greedily. She poured him another. He smacked his lips.

  “Ah! How the wheel turns! She had a son who died with his sword in hand. Come, lady, I will show thee to thy kin. The cuckoo calls in yonder wood. Who’s that?”

  His brief instant of semilucidity had passed. After she had convinced him to partake of a few morsels, Lilith took her leave of the old man and left him to his fancies.

  But as she rowed away, she felt her pulse slow, sluggish as mud in her arteries.

  H
aving learned that her mother’s death was caused by her flight from some imaginary pursuer, and knowing already that her grandfather fancied he was being followed, Lilith wondered if there might be some hereditary link to the delusions. If so, would the affliction eventually be passed down to her? She would not reveal her private forebodings to her family; they seemed too terrible, too momentous to be spoken aloud. As a result, she could not know that they shared her suspicions about her family’s madness. Alone in her broodings, she felt as if an immense ball of solid iron were suspended on chains over her head; a ball which, if left alone, would continue to hang unaltered, but if interfered with would turn out to be not a metal sphere at all, but an inflated bladder, and burst at the slightest touch, showering catastrophe on all and sundry. Somehow, avoiding acknowledgment of the problem, sidestepping the naming of the source of anxiety, made her fears less threatening, less probable.

  As time went on, the insanity of Old Man Connick plunged to ever more extravagant depths. The philanthropical Lady of Corráin had sent a sackful of discarded garments to clothe the poor and needy of the marsh. Some of them found their way to the home of Lilith’s grandfather. Lately he had dressed himself in a lace jabot, with a striped stocking on one calf and a plain one on the other, a pair of trousers on his legs and another tied around his middle, an ill-fitting coat of oilskin so ancient it had stiffened to the intractability of tarred canvas, a child’s bonnet on his head, and a single mitten on his left hand. He wore no shoes, for he harbored an unreasoning fear of footwear. With his skin all patched with scabs and blistered with sores, his wisps of hair lank and dripping with sweat, his eyes like spills of yellow cream stirred through with threads of ripe saffron, and his mouth shapeless, spitting, he presented a bizarre spectacle.

  Sometimes he would take his old sword, notched and rusted, and go tottering through the marsh, swinging his blade at imaginary foes and shouting threats and curses against enemies on land and sea. “I will come at you with violence, and I will inspire dread and wonder!”

  The frogs playing their castanets and the crickets sawing at their violins would fall silent as he went rampaging by. Quiet, pale faces peered from swirls of green hair in glimmers of opaque water, and weird eyes squinted from leafy bowers, lamp-lighted eyes of peppermint and cerise and cyan: unhuman. Some shrieked at the old man and some chattered, but they let him pass and did not touch him. Perhaps they sensed the madness ripe in him, the insanity that burned and boiled in his blood; and to wights, perhaps he seemed akin to them, for their world is not ours, and the old man dwelled only partially in common reality. His frame walked there and shouted there, but his mind had gone far, far away and wandered lonely in some alien void.

  Meanwhile, the relatively sane folk of the marsh must go about their mundane tasks.

  Eolacha worked in the cottage, boiling down the bark of white willow to make a decoction for easing pain. An iron cauldron sobbed and steamed over the fire. When her son entered, ducking to clear the lintel, the old woman put down the ladle with which she had been stirring the pot. She dried her hands on her apron and poured a bowl of soup, then seated herself at the table, leaning her elbows upon it.

  “Sit and sup,” she said to Earnán. “You have not rested.” She forbore from adding since the death of Liadán.

  Earnán seated himself on his customary stool, enfolding the deep bowl in his calloused hands. His brow bore the ruptures of grief and puzzlement.

  By his ankles, the upial enthusiastically sharpened its claws on the table leg.

  “On the night when she—when it happened,” began Earnán, stumbling on the words, “Lia had been visiting her father. Is it not so?”

  “It is so,” Eolacha affirmed.

  “Afterward, I surmise, she went to Lizardback Ridge.”

  “No doubt.”

  “And then she ran for home in a fright, so terrified that she chose the perilous shortcut, trod unwarily, and fell into the Drowning Pool.”

  The carlin sat silent, with bowed head. The upial jumped out from under the table and began chasing its own tail.

  “Old Man Connick,” said Earnán in a voice so low it could scarcely be heard, “hears the sound of following footsteps. They move when he moves, stop when he stops. He fancies he sees the imprint of feet in the mud or the moss, or trailing across the floor. Yet no one else can see or hear these figments of his dreams. He rants that every year the invisible pursuer is approaching closer. He lives in dread that one day it must catch up to him. When this delusion first came on him, he traveled throughout the Four Kingdoms seeking refuge. Yet he is claiming the footsteps found him out everywhere he went. Neither charms sold to him by druids’ agents nor weeds and simples from the apothecaries could exorcise his nightmares. With this subject you are well acquainted, máthair; for even you could not help him. Came a day when my darling wife, once as sane and blithe as the day, began to appear altered. She was seeming distracted, sorrowful—but she would not tell me why. I supposed she found some solace in isolation on the wild heights of the Ridge, but I could discover no way to help her. I could only be hoping that in time her feverishness would pass. Instead, it proved her bane.” He choked back tears.

  The carlin rested her parched leaf of a hand upon her son’s arm. Her touch brought reassurance. The upial sprang up on the lap of the old woman, kneaded her thighs painfully with its claws, and settled there, purring.

  Earnán’s voice was harsh, as if grazed. “What made her flee that evening, máthair? What was she seeing on the heights that frightened her so? Is it real after all, this eldritch hunter the old man dreads?”

  “It was nothing she encountered on the heights,” answered the carlin soberly. “It was what she carried with her, in her head—what she tried to deny but could not prevent.”

  The eel-fisher’s weathered face sharpened with apprehension. “Was she speaking to you of this?”

  “She was. Out of love she wished to conceal it from you and Lilith, but ultimately she spoke to me.” Eolacha stood irresolute for the space of three heartbeats and then said abruptly, “A sound of walking feet was beginning to intrude on her sleep.”

  The fire crackled. A strenuous sob racked the man’s frame.

  “She took to wandering,” said the crone, “singing and gathering flowers to drive harsh thoughts from her mind. For she was terrified that she might be walking the same path as her father. As you know, his madness and degradation are worsening rapidly of late. After visiting him that evening, beholding him groveling in the abysm of his despair and humiliation, she must have sped to the heights in search of consolation or distraction. And there, perhaps, some distant echo of the footsteps brushed at the edges of her awareness and she fled toward her haven, her home.”

  She handed her son a square of woven angora to absorb his tears, saying, “Liadán is resting now in peace, and sorely do we miss her. In her life she endured much sorrow. Her own mother died giving her birth, and Lilith’s father perished before the poor infant was born. It was only after she wedded you that Liadán found happiness once more. Yet even that was marred by her father’s illness.” Absently she caressed the upial’s bristly back. “’Tis strange indeed, it seems. Most odd.”

  “What can you mean? Why odd?”

  “In truth, I fear—” Eolacha broke off, drummed her fingers on the tabletop, then resumed, “I fear there seems to be some pattern.”

  Earnán remained silent.

  “A pattern,” repeated the carlin. Her neck sank between her bony shoulders, as though she bore some weighty burden. “It has happened with Lilith’s parents and grandparents that with each couple, one died young and the other was afflicted by madness. I know not if this is significant, but ’tis a strange coincidence indeed. It is as if there is something passed down from one generation to the next …”

  Over the fire, the contents of the cauldron gulped like boiling porridge. Eolacha rose quickly to her feet, seized the ladle, and began stirring the brew. Steam looped and coiled like p
ale strands of hair, condensing in opalescent pearls along the underside of the mantelshelf.

  Straightening her back, she spoke again. “We must not mention our conjectures to Lilith. They would only provoke unnecessary anxiety. My fears may well be unfounded. I have never heard her speak of hearing eldritch footsteps.”

  Earnán shot a dubious glance toward his mother. “And mayhap she will never be doing so,” he said, endeavoring to imbue his words with the ring of certainty.

  A dried-up sprig of crowthistle on the floor in a corner caught the carlin’s eye. Having escaped the broom, it lay where it had dropped from Liadán’s crown of flowers.

  “Mayhap,” she said, adding fervently: “Upon my life, I hope it may be so.”

  The night came like a swift chariot, wheeled by the moon, drawn by horses the color of melancholy.

  Day followed.

  Under cloudy skies, the aqueous sheets of Seven Leaves Bayou were laminated with a rippling skin like poured mercury. Squiggles of tree reflections crayoned themselves down its metallic luster. On an islet therein, Lilith and Cuiva collected wild angelica, spearmint, and pennyroyal.

  Among the fragrant herbs, Lilith knelt, her eyes swimming. Her mother had taught her to identify these plants. The memory pained her. She missed her mother with the ache of a deep wound. Since the evening Liadán’s body had been discovered floating in the pool, she had neither smiled nor laughed, nor found joy in anything. Two jewels fell from her eyes, an emerald and a diamond, alchemized by their mirroring of green leaves and silver water. On hearing the sounds of someone approaching, the two girls raised their heads. A young man was pushing through the tassel-headed reeds.

  Lilith’s scented harvest spilled from her basket as she scrambled to her feet. The breath caught in her throat. She thought her breathing and pulse ceased altogether, but in that instant she did not care if she lived or died, if only she were not dreaming.