by Greer Gilman
He wheeled about.
"I would you were beyond the sea; beyond his malice. I would you might be safer under my roof; but mine aunt bears no great love toward you. Yet covets: as she would a string of stones. For this neck or for that: but under lock and key."
She knew that. Still she stood.
Now he turned from the hearthroom to the glazen window, leaning on the sill, and gazing at the deepset pane, that in the gathering wintry dusk gave back his face. As if he haunted Jinny's orchard, looking in, moon pale amid the trees.
They gather in her trees, the dead. Untold, unleaving, they arise and flutter, swirl and fall. They clamor, silent as the snow in snow, they beat themselves, unbodied, at the windows of her memory, at the doors of sleep. They quarrel for the crumbs of her, her apronful of dreams. They starve.
"Thou gravity.” A low voice. “I could believe that you are Ashes indeed."
Am I not?
He stooped and took a brand, and lit her stump of tallow on its dish. So early dark. He stood, the candle shaded by his hand. “They do say, our wisewives, that each who bears the part is very Ashes, aye, that giddy girl, and this; yet some that wear the coat become it. Mistress Jin...” Still gazing. Light licked shadow: lapping, lapping at the eaves, and yet the dark still overspilled. “As a boy I would not cross this threshold, no not the shadow of her smoke, for awe. My nurse did say that heedless boys who stole her witch's apples died of cramp; I craved a colder fruit of her, an older root, still green; and would not take, for dread.” He set the candle on the table; watched it steadying. “She told my mother's death."
That cloth is done, said inwit. And the loom is bare
"My father—” A wind in the keyhole, that set the candle cowering in its dish. He broke the furl of wax; it flared. “I am fit for naught,” he said. “Old wives."
A longdrawn silence.
"Will you tell a death?” He took the gold ring from his hand. His father's seal, the Ship. His white face overstamped with it: the wax of him all ship and masted ship heeled over, fallen stars. “No kindred. One I—knew.” She took it: cold and heavy, canted, sleek: a whirlpool in her hand, the sea his grief. It whelmed her. Salt and wave. The ship of him at breaking ... Drowned, she thought. But saw no spirit striving in the wrack but Grevil's, overfraught with grief and love. Clawing in her hair to draw her down. “Not your mourning,” said her unaccustomed voice. “His soul.” His face in shadow, fire in her hand. From within his coat, his shirt, he took a thing of tinsel, silver-black, and laid it in her hand: a star.
All gold, what she saw then: a huntsman in a harvest field, a restless careless ranting boy, a-dazzle like the wind in barley. Not to sheave. Cloud towered at the back of him: it brooded thunder, burnished brighter yet the gold of harvest. There was hail to come. He held a moorcock in his hand, bloodwet: still plump with August, ruffled and agape. I'll the pluck of it, he mocking said, and thou the quill.
He spoke through Ashes, in her voice. She saw the grief and wonderment in Grevil's face, as if his soul were sky in which these planets moved. It dizzied her. It is a glass, she thought, this telling; I can see what is, that never yet was seen.
She told night-lording Hulver and his starry train.
* * * *
Cracked, cracked with voyaging, her hands, voice, spirit cankered with the salt of witches: Whin told on, though wave on wave astounded her. Her ship was will. No stars to reckon by. No north but in the tending of her blood; no blood but in the body left astounded in the hall: that slept, and yet took hurt of travelling. A witchfire played about her mast, now, nowhere, madding her with visions. There were voices in the shrouds.
My lady was another sky, a sea of air; the souls in it that swam not stars but cold and burning planets, brilliantly malign: the monsters of her deep. Whin told them all, the great stones and the islands scattering between; and telling each, was twinned with her as if they lay within one belly, braiding blood with blood of hers, and soul with soul.
She'd gone too far for turning, so went farther on.
She told how Bodva of Idho got herself with child of Annis; but miscarried of the stone. A mole, a moonegg of the Witch, and likest to a raven, so they say—she thought of Morag's thralls, abhorring them—but with a woman's dugs, a harpy's lust, insatiable. She fed on flesh, quick or carrion, drank moonblood and manseed; but her prey was souls. Her bane was Askell's lady, waking by the hallows tree, whereon he hung. That same Asenath slew her, stooping on his corse.
"And fools made tales of it,” said Morag.
Whin dared much; but she dared not drink the cup of bone that Morag set beside her, black wine and milk; nor eat the strips of withered flesh.
"Go on,” my lady said.
"And Hrakki o Scar would use no blood, but argued, stone o stone. So she did match her soul wi’ it."
"What end?"
"Her witch is stone and sleeps. I sailed a nine weeks north and see'd it.” But Whin is there now, in its overshadowing. Her small boat shudders on the waves. The witch is huger than a hillside, black and lucid as the starless night; but faulted. Flawed through. She's swallowed up the moon and stars, drunk down the bowl of night; but in her the sky is buckled, like a sheet of silver leaf, infolding on itself. Cloud coils from her, her hair is boreal, and all that windward coast a wrack of ships. The stone is cold to crack the marrow, craze the blood. And deep within lies Hrakki's knife, a sickle like the waning moon, but nowhere, caught a thousand times in seeming. It is broken. Her sister Hrima set upon the stone with it, to break a shard, or pry the soul away; and shattered, as her flesh were ice: her soul was long subsumed.
Ashes that was Thea's daughter dreamed. There was a bowl of pomegranates set before my lady at her meat. And every lobe of each a clustering of blood, and every seed a soul. My lady chose; then looked to Ashes, beckoning, as she did draw her ravens down to feast. Come, Madam. Here is banqueting.
She loathed; and yet she hungered for it. Not a word: yet Annis knew.
For thy bellyful? What wouldst thou give?
To eat of it, my lady?
To be eaten. She had split the orb of it; and inward of its lips lay glistening galaxies, packed world on world.
My secrets.
Thou art glass to me. What other?
Surfeit and desire and sickening: a rage was in her blood. All that is, said Ashes; and she gave the sky.
It rattled like a dice-box in my lady's hand, a black orb like a blasted pomegranate; then it split, spilled stars that dimmed with falling. They were on some lightless shore; the sand was all of stars, extinct. Their ashes. Out beyond, the tideless sea was stale with tumbling, like a rucked and sweated bed. Come, my lady said, Thy secrets. And she raught with bloodnailed hands to split her, fork to eyes.
She woke. She knew not who she was, nor in what bed; but dry-mouthed, drenched with fear, she lay upon the anvil of her dream, heart hammering, until the chink of metal, amulet on amulet, recalled her. Ashes. Groping for her coat, she wrapped it round her, skin to skin, her fingers buried in its matted fleece; yet slept no more. A daemon in her wept and raged with longing for a thing she knew not and abhorred; until at first light of a bitter day she rose, and pricked a finger for an ashing. Yet she made no trance; no vision came, no words. As Ashes, she was blinded to herself. She could not tell her blood.
* * * *
Brief light and whitely fallen snow. Ashes that was Margaret sat wrapped in the old quilt, with Jack Daw's stolen pack spread out before her on the floor, in knots and wheels and magpie cronyings. The cards were old and terrible; the coat had given them. Assigned them: they were something she must need. Warily, she turned and puzzled at them, at the underside of light. Not baneful in themselves, she thought, no more than fire was, or night: but rank with their master's witchcraft, steeped in black sorcery. They scented of him, of his sex; of smoke as from a fire of flesh and bone; of earth as grave. They were tallowy with handling. Yet the bite and dazzle of his blade was in them, and his rancor: the very paper of them
buzzing like a wasps’ nest. And they felt in some way implicated, tied. As if by turning them, he'd tugged at something: at a leash of hounds, at jesses or a bridle bit; a barbed hook in a bloody mouth. As if he spurred destiny or hawked with fate. Caught fish.
The cards were not her pack she knew, but shadows of them, disconcertingly unlike and like. Strange mirrors of the old devices. Strange guises of the sun and moon; new emblems for the stars. By the constellation, this she held would be the Nine: not drawn as sisters in their tower, bending to their starry web; but as stones of crystal in a coffer, iron bound: as fragments of the shattered heavens, with the stars still captive in their shards. Eight of them: one lost.
Here, in a cater of cards, were half the burnt stars all at once: an ill trick. The Huntsman and the Tower; the Hound and the Swift, still reeling off the lives of mortals. It was painted as a child with a whirligig, running heedlessly, enchanted with his toy. Before his dazzled eyes there lay abyss: a race of water and the great wheel of the mill of bones.
Cinque and sice. The Poppyheads, the Hare. That crone in the stubble field, who crouched and scrabbled at the clodded earth. Were they all of them her tale?
Here, the Ship: but furled of sail and battered, heeling over in a tempest on a woodcut raging sea. A tiny figure, wreathed in picted flame, fell burning from the masthead. Far and leeward lay a louring shore, all wolfish rocks: toward which the Ship was driven. It would break. And on that island stood the Tower in epitome, as in the pupil of an eye.
And here, the Hanged Man, and the avid crows: but each with Morag's face, with women's bodies naked to the fork. White bellies and black—
That she turned as if it burnt her fingers; turned it back, to look on Morag's cold envenomed eyes, her talons and her beak. Her body, as a dreadful mirror of her own: what she might be. What Ashes in the stubble field had urged on her. She could not bear to look; she had to know. The next and then the next. The Scythe. Old Slae, from the trial. She flinched. And turned again, and shut her eyes and scrabbled up the pack. No more. But the image burned within her eyes, black, white, ablaze, as if she'd gazed on lightning: Ashes lying with her secrets agape to the kneeling Sun. Not the worst, not yet. What she dreaded was the Crowd of Bone: to see her mother's endless death.
Abyss and origin.
Shuddering, she dipped her sullied hands in water, wiped them on the Ashes coat. She knelt back on her heels, remembering how in darkness she'd imagined sky: a garland of the light, wreathed round with sun and moon, a netted caul of stars. A world no wider than her brow.
And this—blasphemy of stars. This crown of hellebore and nightshade.
It was all too much for her, too much. The wayless heavens and the weltering earth. Vertiginous. Her cosmos cracked and shivered like an egg; her child's true body changing fearfully: untrustable, estranged. She wept now for the dark, the prison of her childhood, for her nutshell full of ghosts. Her realm. Furled and shivering, she mourned the old bright stars of innocence: the wood above, unleaving. Bright cards in a darker place.
Margaret, do you see the leaves?
She looked up in sudden wrenching hope. Thea? No one there: the shadow of a memory of a voice. She bowed beneath a piercing desolation. Gone. Her mother's whispering voice: the guide, the Ship-star of her nighted sky. Far gone, the paradise of Norni's lap. Not hers by right. She thought of Imbry and her namesake. Of her shadow sister who was dead, whose milk she had stolen, whose cradle-place she had usurped. Of her doll that Morag burnt to ashes: as a Scarrish witchery, she said. But lied. All of them gone: her mothers and her sister and her cradle of stars. And she had no tongue to cry.
I am Ashes of myself. No answer.
White uninflected light. The fire sinking.
No, she thought: I am braided of them, of their voices telling. I am what they made. They made me to go on.
And she remembered a small thing lying in the palm of her hand, as round as a hazelnut, shining as a moon: their lives within her life.
With a fingertip in soot, she traced the crossed curves of the sky, of Ashes's rune, on the hearthstone. As she bent, her charms jangled: it was braided in her hair, with others, over and again. Time and memory. They crossed in Ashes.
She could not speak; but she could tell.
She called her cards to mind. On the floor of hardpacked, limewashed earth, she laid them out in memory, Lykewise: the Ship, the Swans, the Nine. The Crowd of Bone, transcending death: unsilenced. She upheld, outspread her hands, as if she took the string of silk from Norni's fingers, overturn and undergo. Almost she felt the ghostly hands that mirrored hers, upholding: give and take. She began.
Thea. I am telling this in Stars.
* * * *
"This one,” said Norni, holding out the string of silk. And in and out, her fingers flicked, enweaving web. She spoke the riddle as she wove.
No fell, but full of bones:
Fleets featherless,
Walks never, wakes summer,
Winterlong is blind.
A flock of eyes have flown.
"A tree,” said Margaret watching. They had played this game.
"So in Cloud they call it,” said her nurse. “They are few in Scar. I had seen none, but their bones cast up in storm.” She tugged and it vanished. “I had a comb of tree."
"But you'd seen it in the stars, the Tree?"
"Nightlong in winter, and the worm at its roots.” She was threading Margaret's hands. “Ringman there. And under. So."
"Imbry's made of tree.” The doll lay in Margaret's skirts, handworn and faceless. “I think she walks there, in the Wood Above."
"And over. See, it grows."
A web between her hands, between their faces. Another riddle. “Is it stars?"
* * * *
The comb was tangled in the nightlong hair: no planet but a rune of stars. It sang amidst the ranting of the witches: lully lullay. Whin knew it for a Scarrish soul, a witch of the Unleaving. It was bone. Not carved but caught in it, as one anatomy of soul, one sentience. It shivered at her thought, all spine. Still telling of the seventh witch, Whin raised that story like a wind, magnificent, to drown her secrecy. Her stormcock's cry was lost in what it prophesied: what it called was tempest. It unskied the hall and vaulted it with lightnings, heaped hailstones to the knee. Unheeded in my lady's trance of ecstasy, Whin touched the windcomb with her spirit.
And she's in an empty room. She sees a cradle overset; she sees a tangle of bright silks. In the roar and crackling of thorns, she sees a burning doll, its blind face like a poppyhead, the petals like a cry. Still swayed by a turmoil in the air, a tumult barely past, the loomstones swing and clack. And further, running further in the pathless dark, a child is crying out.
Kit's lass's bairn; my lady's daughter's child.
A nurse, she would have had a nurse, thought Whin. Her mother slain, they must have set her to a stranger's breast: her comfort, her unleaving. Aye, a witch, to fat the bairn on power. Milk of sorcery. Which suckled dry, was then a hindrance to my lady's governing: so quenched. So nothing, to my lady's mind and Morag's. After the unruly grief, the discipline of grief, their pupil should have thought no more on her, than on her last year's leavings. But that nurseling was a mortal child; her nurse a witch of Scarristack: they'd memory and will. Their art was not of Annis’ kind, nor any she could sense. It held no power, save what lay between them, child and tender. Not of law but love.
There are snags in the riverrune of story, that unravelled let it run.
Softly, softly, Whin undid the comb, and millennia of night slid free, unbraiding of its knots. One strand, but only one: the souls in it ran down like stars of water stilling from a thorn; like blood. A thaw in the winter, a silence in the storm.
And of itself the comb begins to tell, the song to sleek the endless nightfall of my lady's hair. There is a far voice answering, as if they work from hand to hand; as if a skein of yarn is winding in a clew. The cradle-tide of story rocks between them, nurse and child: Ashes to Ashes,
then and now and then.
They tell the Annis witch asleep.
* * * *
The ravens came at barley, flying from the east. They broke the mist and saw the black cliffs sheer beneath them, flint-flaked with a yell of birds; they saw the steep green rising, and the maze of stones, man-set, a moorweb. They saw sheep, and knew the blackfaced ewe was dying; saw the dead lamb at its fork. They saw a woman by a stone house, grinding at a quern. They stooped. One sat on the rigpole, the other on the wall, crying hoarsely to its make. They'd spied her out. She banned them; they flapped and rose, derisory, and called. A third came wheeling from the law, unmoonwise. Something fell into her lap, a small thing, like a grain of corn: a milkwhite stone. A sort.
Siorvar rose heavily, for she bided her nine moons; she went in, stooping at her low skin door. Her work was doing and undone, and all to do. She would ask her weaving what the stone forespelled; though her blood knew. By the hearth stood her loom of whalebone, warped and weighted down with stones, all sea-thirled: cracked or cloudy, black and white and red. This, green as hailstorm but undying, Tharri Thrasi's dam had found, between the water and the land; that, nightblack with the stars’ long swirl on it, had caught between the sea and sky: Pirr, climbing with a strayed lamb on her back, had found it, brought it landward in her mouth. Look, the moon's egg, she had said: that winter brooded it, breasthigh in snow. That round blue rock had drawn a call of whales behind it, flinching on the shore. The stone called sunwise was the eldest, drowned at hallows, found at lightfast burning on the waves.
Slowly, she began to weave. She'd warped the moorit and the shaela threads, in the pattern called the shoal of seals. But as she wove, she saw a strange thing growing in her web. Tree, she said, and named it in the Cloudish tongue. Her own had none. She's seen its bones, like an old man's wracked with winters, lying on the shore. The bones of Cloud, they called it, Mallywrack. She knew the rime. She spoke it as she wove: “No fell, but full of bones..."
