Once Upon a Dreadful Time

by Dennis L McKiernan

  At the naming of Orbane and an acolyte a gasp went up from the gathering, especially from the old woman, followed by a pall of silence.

  But then the tinker added, “I think it was someone called . . . now let me see . . . something like, Wrenlybee, though that isn’t it at all.”

  The old woman’s cup slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor with a clang. “Wrenlybee? Do you instead mean Rhensibé?”

  The tinker turned and slowly nodded. “Ah, oui, Goody, I think that was it. Rhensibé.”

  With a screech, the old woman flung a hand out toward the stranger, her fingers clawlike, her wrist twisting. The man gasped and clutched at his chest, and fell to his knees, and men drew back in startlement and fear, though one, Gravin, sprang to the tinsmith’s aid.

  Wailing, the old woman spun ’round and ’round like a dark, whirling wind and hurtled toward her bundle of twigs. She snatched it up, and—lo!—no bundle it was, but a besom instead. Out the door she slammed, ere any could seem to move.

  “Witch!” cried Marcel, and leapt in pursuit, the others charging after, all but Gravin and the tinker, who yet wheezed and said, “Someone dropped an anvil on my chest.”

  Outside, no old woman did the men find, though across the face of the moon a ragged shadow darted.

  “I was up and away ere they could act,” muttered Hradian. “And when I searched in my dark mirror for Rhensibé, all it showed was a scatter of bones there in the Winterwood snow. Borel will pay for this, I swear.”

  Hradian’s thoughts were interrupted by a loud chorus of croaking from the mire, as if every toad and every frog were sounding an alarm, though no alarm this, for swamp creatures fall silent when danger draws nigh. No, this was something else—a signal, a calling—and the bogland was filled with a racking din.

  “Ah, good. Crapaud has done his job.”

  Again Hradian waited, and once more her mind fell into thoughts of revenge. “Next was Iniquí. Her end came at the hands of that slattern Liaze. But how, I know not. All was fiery when I sought Iniquí, nothing left, there below a frigid, obsidian mountain. . . .”

  Carrying a broom—a twiggy besom—over one shoulder and a rucksack slung from the other, the small child wended through Market Square, looking at this, purchasing that, especially mosses and herbs and oddities. Strange things for a child to want, now, weren’t they? Or so the goodwives asked themselves.

  Regardless of whispered comments, the child meandered on, filling her satchel with odds and ends—dried lizards, living newts, sheep’s eyes, and other peculiarities. Why, one might think she was a—Ah, but that could not be. She was nought but a child after all.

  The day was dim and damp, the low-hanging clouds grazing the tops of even the meanest of buildings. Yet this was mountain country, and often did clinging air and misty vapor curl through the town; one merely needed to be bundled against such. Nevertheless, it was market day, when farmers and mendicant friars and merchants and other such gathered to trade or sell their wares. Occasionally a swindler or cutpurse would show up, but the local men quickly took care of such unsavory riffraff.

  At one corner of the square, two men sat at a table, an échiquier between them, other men standing and watching as the échecs game went on, quiet conversation among them.

  The girl paused when she heard one of the onlookers utter a particular name.

  “. . . Liaze, they say.”

  “And where did this come from?” asked one of the men.

  “I heard it over at the Poulet Gris.”

  “Ah, pish, what do they know? ’Tis nought but drunks who frequent that place.”

  “Well it was but a rumor.”

  “And this princess and a rooster killed a witch?”

  “Pecked her to death, I shouldn’t wonder,” muttered someone.

  This brought a round of laughter from them all, quickly hushed as one of the players scowled up from the board. When the bystanders fell silent, that player then moved his tower and said, “Check.”

  It brought a mutter from the onlookers, for they had not seen it coming. It was after all a revealed check rather than one from a direct move.

  Long did the opponent ponder his options.

  Finally, one man whispered, “Did this witch have a name?”

  “Iniquitous, I think.”

  Behind them the child shrieked, and there came a cold blast of air, and when the men turned, no one was there, though the clouds just above swirled in turbulence, as if something had shot through at speed.

  “I didn’t realize it then, but now I believe the obsidian mountain must be where the key was forged.” Hradian ground her teeth. “Stupid, stupid Iniquí. She should have known there is a much easier way. She died for her stupidity, and for that Liaze shall pay.”

  Of a sudden the croaking din outside ceased altogether, leaving behind a deafening quiet. And then there came a splat of feet and a stench, a reek, as of swamp bottom. Hradian turned. At the door stood an eight-foot-tall Bogle. Dark and Goblinlike he was, and bald and naked, his swollen male organ erect. He smiled, showing wicked pointed teeth, and he gestured toward the bed.

  “Bah, you fool,” spat Hradian, “I need a live three-horned sticky-tongue.”

  The smile vanished.

  “You heard me: a three-horned sticky-tongue, and alive. Now go.”

  The erection drooped, and the Bogle glanced from the witch to the bed and back.

  “I said go!”

  The creature, his organ now flaccid, turned and dove into the turgid waters.

  Her black eyes snapping in irritation, Hradian muttered and fumed and stared at the now empty doorway. Another splat sounded out on the flet, and the overlarge, bloated toad waddled across to take up station nigh the door. Hradian stepped to the opening. “I need to teach you, Crapaud, a different signal for those times I merely want an errand run.”

  Hradian returned to the bench, alternately thinking of the aroused Bogle and of the vengeance she would wreak upon Valeray and all his get. “Including you, Princess Céleste, for you are the youngest, and you slew the youngest of us—Nefasí....”

  Mid a great celebration in the port city of Mizon, a matron asked one of the celebrants what the ado was all about.

  “Women are safe again, especially demoiselles.”

  “Safe? From what?”

  “Have you not heard? The Changeling Lord is dead.”

  “Dead? How?”

  “A chevalier, Roél by name, slew him.”

  “I do not believe it,” said the matron, shaking her head.

  “King Avélar himself announced it.”

  The matron sighed. “The Lord of the Changelings dead?”

  “Oui, and not only that, but the king also said that Céleste, Princesse de la Forêt du Printemps slew one of Orbane’s acolytes—a witch named Nefasí.”

  The matron shrieked and turned and fled away through the gay crowd.

  “And she, too, will pay, will Céleste,” muttered Hradian.

  Again the witch paced the floor, waiting for the skin she needed, plotting her vengeance, and thinking of the Bogle as well.

  A short while later, once more the Bogle appeared at her door. In his hand he held a squirming lizard—a pale brown three-horned sticky-tongue.

  “Bon!” crowed Hradian. She took the reptile from the Bogle and placed it in a widemouthed jar and capped it with a tin plate. Then she turned to the Bogle and gestured toward her bed.

  With the Bogle finally gone back into the foetid swamp, Hradian, now naked, returned to her grimoire and the elixir she would brew. She filled the tin pot with a greenish-yellow fluid from a jar labeled “bile,” and then lit the fat-burner below. When the fluid began to simmer, one by one and at certain times and most carefully she dropped the ingredients into the seething liquid: the turning monkshood leaf, the chrysalis of the golden butterfly, the belladonna berry, and more. At a critical point, she retrieved the lizard from the jar and held it against the square of alabaster vellum. The repti
le’s eyes independently turned this way and that, as if seeking a way to flee, and its prehensile feet sought to grasp something, a branch, a limb, something by which it could escape this thing holding it. Hradian jabbed the creature, and it shifted color. “Not vert, you idiot,” she spat at the now-green lizard. “Can you not see what I hold you against?”

  Once more she jabbed it, and once more it changed color, this time to a muddy brown. Again and again Hradian tormented the reptile, and again and again it changed tint—russet, beige, ochre, yellow, jade—all to the witch’s frustrated shouts, but of a sudden it took on the hue of the vellum, and in that moment, Hradian broke its neck.

  Swiftly she skinned it, and dropped that into the tin pot on the tripod above the fat-burner. She threw the flayed remains of the lizard out onto the flet, where Crapaud snatched them up with his long tongue and swallowed them whole.

  Referring often to her spell book, all night Hradian muttered arcane words over the bubbling brew, and she dropped various leaves and stems and berries and blossoms and insects and other such into the simmering liquid, adding goodly amounts of her own urine to the mix and small amounts of her feces. And she spat into the pot, and ran her finger through her crotch and stirred with that finger a single circuit widdershins in the liquid as well. Then she pricked her hand with a needle, and blood and teardrops came, each of which she dripped into the mix. And with silk strings she briefly dipped various ores and crystals into the brew, hissing strange utterances all the while, loudly singing these words when she repeatedly bobbed a flake of alchemically transmuted gold in and out of the fluid as the concoction boiled down and down.

  At last she reached the end of the lengthy recipe laboriously detailed in her grimoire, and she removed the pot from the flame and cautiously poured every last drop of the warm and ocherous result into a small vial and capped it. Then she laughed in glee and danced nakedly about her cote, holding up the potion and crooning.

  5

  Suspicions

  Some two candlemarks after the arrival of the retinues, when the travelling kindred had freshened themselves and had changed out of their riding clothes—the women into silks and satins and soft slippers, and the men into trews and jerkins and such—the distaff side gathered in the green room, while the men gravitated to the armory to inspect the arms and armor to be used in the tournament to come.

  As tea was served to the ladies, Simone looked about the intimate chamber, with its velvet walls the color of pale jade, and its floor of a tile an even lighter green. The comfortable chairs they sat in were upholstered in an emeraldine fabric bearing a pattern of tiny diamonds of light yellow. They sat in an arc about a small, unlit fireplace ensconced in a corner, the room comfortable on this summer eve with air wafting in through open bay windows. Glass-chimneyed candles in stands lit the chamber with a soft glow, reflecting highlights from the gilt frames of several modest landscapes: a placid lake nestled among snowcapped mountains; a green glade half-seen through a curling fog; a herd of horses racing across sunlit, rolling hills, and running before a distant storm sweeping after. In addition, on the wall above the mantel hung a quartet of individual small portraits of children—two boys and two girls—presumably those of Valeray and Saissa.

  Simone’s gaze then went to the arc of women: to her left sat Avélaine, and then on ’round deasil were Camille and Saissa and Liaze and Céleste and Michelle. In a pocket high on Camille’s gown slept a small sparrow—Scruff his name—a thing Simone found most curious.

  To the left of each chair stood a small round table of some sort of dark wood, on which one of the maids placed saucers and cups, and a second one poured tea for each lady, the third adding milk and honey if so desired. A sideboard of the same dark wood—ebony?—sat against one wall, and there the maids placed the tea service and then withdrew.

  When the staff softly closed the door behind, Saissa took a deep breath and peered down into her cup, as if seeking tranquility therein. Then she raised her gaze to the gathering. “For nearly four years I have at times felt as if someone or something vile has been in my chamber. Yet when I look about for the source, nought is there. The feeling comes and goes, and oft is very brief, though at times it has lingered awhile. I understand that Liaze, Céleste, Camille, and Michelle have sensed the very same thing, have had the very same experiences. Not so?”

  “Oui, Maman,” said Liaze, the others nodding in agreement.

  But Michelle added, “I do not discern the feeling of malice unless Borel is with me. And yet it does not emanate from him but from somewhere else. I think it is directed at him, though he does not detect ought.”

  “None of the men seem to be aware,” said Saissa, “at least Valeray does not.”

  In the armory, with its racks of arms and armor, of hauberks and helms and shields, of bows and arrows and crossbows and quarrels and darts and spears, of halberds and hammers and maces and axes and morning stars, of daggers and poniards and dirks and swords and other such weaponry, some bronze and glittery, others dark and dull, Émile watched as his eldest son hefted one of the tournament lances, long and slender, its point bluntly padded. “Ha! With this one I will unhorse you other three,” said Laurent.

  “Pah!” snorted Blaise, replacing a battle-axe in a stand of the weapons. “You and what other hundred knights?”

  Émile laughed, as did the others, all but King Valeray, who merely smiled.

  “You appear troubled,” said Émile. “Is something weighing on your mind?”

  “It’s just these sensings the women have,” replied Valeray.

  “Sensings?”

  “As if something or someone evil is spying in on us—on Borel and Michelle, on Liaze and Luc, on Alain and Camille, on Céleste and Roél, and on Saissa and me.”

  “Are you certain that it is not some sort of womanly vapours? My own Simone is at times given to such, and—”

  “Non, Émile, these are no vapours, no caprice d’une femme. My daughters and daughters-in-law and my wife, they truly sense this malevolent thing, this spying, yet, for me, I detect nought whatsoever.”

  “Neither do we, Papa,” replied Alain, with Borel and Luc and Roél signifying their agreement.

  Borel said, “Though I do not perceive ought amiss, sometimes Slate seems to sense evil is nigh.”

  “Slate?” asked Émile.

  “One of my Wolves,” said Borel. Then he smiled and added, “I suggested to Chelle that women are perhaps closer to Wolves than are men.”

  Valeray barked a laugh, yet quickly grew serious again. “Ah, me, but this is no humorous matter. Saissa says that it’s as if some evil, unseen creature has invaded our chambers, and we must do something about it.”

  “Do you sense anything, Avélaine?” asked Simone.

  “Non, Maman.”

  Simone turned her gaze toward the others. “Yet the five of you do?”

  “Oui, Simone,” said Saissa. “I have told Valeray that it’s as if a vile but invisible being is at hand.”

  “Vile but invisible being?” gasped Simone. “Oh, Mithras, then something must be done. Why, it could be anywhere.”

  Avélaine gasped and put a hand to her abdomen, yet said nought.

  Camille took note of the gesture but said, “Alain and I believe it is Hradian. Somehow she is spying upon us, seeking a way to gain revenge.”

  “Revenge for what?” asked Émile, taking up a dagger and gauging its balance and heft.

  “The death of her three sisters,” replied Alain, “acolytes all.”

  Émile frowned. “Acolytes? Of what religion?”

  “No religion, Papa,” said Roél, hanging a shield back on its hook. “Instead those three dead were acolytes of Orbane, a foul wizard. Only his fourth one remains.”

  Émile raised a puzzled eyebrow and turned up a hand. “Perhaps someone had better explain, for Simone and Laurent and Blaise and I are newly come unto Faery.”

  Laurent and Blaise both nodded in agreement.

  “Very well,�
� said Valeray, glancing at Borel and Alain. “Mayhap it will do us all good to review just why it might be Hradian—the last acolyte—and what she might have in mind.”

  Saissa stood and stepped to the sideboard. “Anyone else for more tea?”

  Shortly, with some cups replenished and others not, Saissa resumed her seat. She took a sip of tea and set her cup aside, then looked about the women and said, “It all began many summers ago, just how many, I remember not, but it was a goodly while back in a time ere I had met Valeray, ere the time our children were born.” Momentarily, Saissa seemed lost in reflection, a hint of a smile on her face. She nodded and then came to herself and continued: “Regardless, the wizard Orbane grew in power, and he had about him four acolytes, four sisters, witches all. And though at the time we knew not their names, they were Rhensibé, Hradian, Nefasí, and Iniquí.

  “Orbane sought power o’er the whole of Faery, and he assembled a great army to march across the realms and take command of all. But he was opposed by the Firsts, and—”

  Émile laid down the keen, bronze sword. “The Firsts?”

  “The first of each kind in Faery, Papa,” said Roél.

  “This speaks to the beginnings of Faery, then?”

  “Oui,” replied Alain. “You see, just as once upon a time there was no mortal world, well then, too, once upon a time there was no Faery. But the gods saw fit to create it and populate it with beings. The first being of each kind is named a First. My wife, Camille, has a conjecture about such.”

  In the green room Saissa looked at Camille and said, “Why don’t you explain it, my dear?”

  “Oh, please do,” said Simone, “for I deem it is something that Reydeau didn’t teach us.”

  “Reydeau?” asked Liaze.

  Céleste said, “I sent Reydeau to tutor Simone and her family and staff of the ways of Faery so that they would know what to expect herein.”

  “Ah, I see.” Liaze turned to Camille and added, “I did not mean to interrupt.”