The Last Stitch (The Chronicles of Eirie: 2)

by Prue Batten

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright © 2009 by Prue Batten

  The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved.

  Kindle Edition 2011

  Previously published in print in 2009 by YouWriteOn.com

  ISBN: 978-1849235082

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  It should be noted that the word ‘Faeran’ (pronounced Far-An) was referenced from an internet site: (http://www.etynmoline.com) The word was derived from the Old English meaning to ‘terrify, frighten’. In the print edition of The Stumpwork Robe (2008) and The Last Stitch (2009), the meanings of panic and grief fitted the theme of the story and I have chosen to continue the word’s use through each of the novels.

  It should also be noted that the word ‘Faeran’ was used by Cecilia Dart-Thornton in The Bitterbynde Saga (2002) and The Crowthistle Chronicles (2006-) and no similarity should be drawn between the two.

  It should also be noted that in the spirit of folklore, I have taken legend and played with it, maybe even changing it a little to suit my story.

  Acknowledgements

  Jane Nicholas for her support and consummate embroidery skill. Adelina’s hands would never have been guided so masterfully, right up to the last stitch.

  Tellers of fable and folklore throughout the centuries - the literature of the world would have been the poorer without them.

  My family.

  Salt Design for the exquisite cover designs.

  Glossary

  Aine: Irish folklore. A Faeran princess. In this novel the Goddess-Creator. ‘Aine’ used as an expletive as we use ‘God!’

  Bicce: bitch

  Bain as: piss off

  Buckthorn: Legendary source of immortality recounted in the story of Gilgamesh. Variously one could prick one’s finger on the thorns or eat the leaves, thereby securing immortality

  Cabyll Ushtey: Celtic folklore. A shape-changing waterhorse that eats mortals, only leaving the entrails

  Ceasg: Scots folklore. A Maiden of the Wave or mermaid

  Eldritch: enchanted or magic

  Faeran: a race of unprincipled, enchanting and enchanted Others. Faeran also implies the world from where they come

  Far Dorocha: Irish folklore. The Dark-Haired Man, abducts women, spiriting them to the world of the Faerie

  Frisson: Sensations that indicate the proximity of an Other, particularly the Faeran

  Ganconer: Irish folklore. Seduces women. Traditionally seen as a man with no shadow, with mist around his shoulders. When he appears, the birds stop singing. A kiss from the Ganconer results in the Pining Death

  Mesmer: an act of enchantment performed with one or both hands or even just a raised finger

  Muirnin: Gaelic for beloved or darling

  Ná: Gaelic for no

  Oscailt Amach: Gaelic for ‘Open Wide’

  Seelie: Benevolent, as opposed to unseelie which means malign.

  Siofra: Irish folklore. Small Others about half the size of a mortal who can be either mailicious or kind

  Stumpwork: A form of raised embroidery. Motifs include flora, fauna, insects and fish. Gold thread, silks, metal purl and beads are used to create thick embroidery with a three-dimensional aspect

  Swan Maid: Northern European folklore. Beauties who shape-shift from swan to woman

  Welkin wind: An enchanted breeze. Can signify the approach or presence of something Other. Also called a Kizmet in the Raj

  Ymp Trees: Irish folklore. Rows of trees that have been grafted and pruned to form long unbroken lines. Thought to hide one of the entrances to the world of the Enchanted

  The story so far:

  The Traveller Adelina, a master embroiderer, is a prisoner and has begun to create a robe that she is covering in stumpwork stitchery. Underneath the sculptural pieces, she has sequestered many tiny books revealing her tragic adventures - meeting and journeying with Ana, her own growing love for Kholi Khatoun who accompanies them and Ana’s blighted passion for Liam, the Faeran who it could be argued brought them all together in the first place.

  Her story relates that after a series of misadventures, they arrive at Star, a tiny town twinkling in the snowy stratosphere of the Celestine Stairway. It is here they meet Severine Di Accia, bane of Adelina’s early life. No one is aware that Severine has studied and become steeped in occult law in her desperate attempt to become immortal. To secure such immortality she must possess two Faeran souls and so she kills the Faeran Elriade, and then Liam, also murdering Kholi Khatoun and entrapping Adelina.

  It is said if the souls are cut in half and sewn onto a garment, then the wearer shall achieve immortality as it seeps through the fabric fibres and into the skin to ‘become’ a part of the wearer. Severine presents the imprisoned stitcher with the souls to be sewn onto the gown, unaware that one of her servants, the one she gives to Adelina, is an Other who must retrieve the souls and return them to their bodies for burial. Adelina and this Other become friends and a promise is extracted from the stitcher that she will avenge the dead on pain of her own death.

  Part One finishes with Adelina’s words… ‘At this point my hatred consumes me. It fills me with a smouldering blackness and each time Severine comes near me, she fans the coals a little bit more. Here a spark, there a flame. I swear on Liam’s and Ana’s souls and on the soul of my beloved Kholi Khatoun that vengeance will be sought.

  It merely remains to be seen whether you would journey onward with me. For this story shall end, mark my words, and it will all be the better when it does. For do they not say in Eirie that revenge is sweet. So repair to the right front of the robe and let us read on...’

  Prologue

  I lurch between sanity and lunacy as the walls of this place press on me, and with each stitch I embroider, in my mind I sew Severine into a shroud having dispatched her in the most brutal way. Sometimes though, like the flame of a lamp in the blackest space, the thought I may have a reader for my secret words gives me comfort in my loneliness. As though they sit beside me, because an imagined friend is the only barrier I have between madness and myself.

  I spend copious time wondering what you are like, you know, you who reads so assiduously. Are you a man or a woman? Are you one of the Museo conservitors? Or are you one of the Museo night-guards?

  But then perhaps you’re a thief. Creeping into the darkened halls, the only noises the slap-slap of the wavelets on the canals outside the windows and your own tense, irregular breathing. Were you unable to stop your fingers reaching out to stroke my embroidery? And in so doing, did you discover its secrets?

  It thrills me that you might be a thief, for I am an accessory to theft. My friend Lhiannon of the Faeran stole something of inestimable value and is even now running away and I helped her.

  But I must be careful, secretive. My only family is close by. Ajax - he of the back broad enough to be that of the Cabyll Ushtey is being held to ransom. I’ve lost so much and he is all that remains. His life is in my obedient hands.

  And thus as you begin again to read, having found three tiny books under the stitching of the shepherd and his sheep, remember that I am threatened... it is my only defence for all that has happened to those I loved. Say the words ‘grow bigger and be, pages to see’ and read on.

  Chapter One

  ‘Yain, tain, tethera.’ Phelim counted the last of the ewes from the scrub as they emerged through the creeping fingers of mist like wraiths. He pulled his oilskin tighter. At the house he knew hands would be reaching for talismans because when a mist threatened, folk became superstitious, aware of the omniscience of Others in the lives of Eirie. As if out of the miasma,
a dark and dangerous foe should come riding to create murder and mayhem.

  The wooly mob circled like a swirl of water running down a sinkhole, round and round as he sent his dog after the animals. ‘Go over, over, good boy.’ The black and white dog flew clockwise around the mob, drawing them in like string atop a jute bag. ‘Go back, back.’ Back the dog shot the other way, always keeping the mob tight, the ewes rumbling in their throats. Phelim stood at the gate squinting through the opacity as the cloven hooves rattled on the scrubby hillside. ‘Yain, tain, tethera, methera,’ he counted in the language of the Travellers. ‘Tethera-bumfitt, methera-bumfitt, giggott! Twenty!’

  With his dog at his heels, a piebald shadow, he headed across the bottom of the yard searching for the Squire, unaware of the maids who watched him surreptitiously. If he knew they desired him, beguiled by his face and his fine form, he remained silent. Those who had bed him would wed him but he never returned twice to the same woman, declining wanton invitation.

  Invariably these young maids would succumb to a form love-sickness and the carlin would be called and by administering judicious herbs and some words of carlin-tongue, the situation would be remedied. The women would glance at Phelim and whilst sighing as he passed them by, would cast more lingering glances at other, plainer men.

  The carlin, Ebba, would hear some of the wiser maids as they whispered amongst themselves. ‘It’s like he’s the Ganconer himself, so charming and winsome is he.’

  ‘To be sure. And the way girls are left love-sick.’

  ‘Oh don’t be ninnies. Look you, he doesn’t smoke a pipe as the Ganconer is rumoured to do and besides Ebba would as like never repair them as is lovelorn if Phelim were the real Love Talker.’

  Ebba heard them and her mouth twisted as if she tasted lemons but her boy had to be a man just like any other on the estate and like any mother she wanted only the best for her child.

  She had found him by the shore as a tiny infant as she fossicked for weeds and seeds for her herbals. He lay in amongst feathers and grasses on a rocky shelf under a cliff overhang. He hadn’t been crying - he merely gazed through earnest wide eyes at his surrounds, playing with star-like fingers. When Ebba investigated the grassy crib she fell in love, her own yearnings sparked by the soft down of his hair, the delicate smell of baby.

  She bent over and touched him, his tiny hands curling around her finger and a shock fizzed up her arm, across her chest to her heart. ‘Oh, my babe,’ she sighed, as her sight blurred. A vision of a dark-headed man walking away into a familiar distance wafted in front of her like a gossamer cloud. Ebba ran her hand over the infant’s head. ‘Aye it’s almost as black as an unseelie night. Is it you in my vision, my sweet?’

  She eased him out of the nest into her arms where he cuddled unconcerned, eyes locking onto the carlin, and she felt bonds looping like a Traveller’s knot, over, under and through. In her wise way, she saw a linking destiny and headed back to the estate to apprise the Squire of her new family member.

  She rigged a story - the babe was her sister’s child and sadly the mother had died giving birth, for tough times had led to a fraught labour. Had not many mothers and infants died in the Archipelago this last year? The Squire, Merrick by name, saw no reason to doubt the words of the carlin, ‘By all means adopt him, rear him and good luck.’ He chucked the baby under the chin and nodded vaguely. ‘It’s your life, your family blood, Ebba. You must do what you believe is right.’ He would never have disputed the woman’s decisions anyway. Not a carlin, never, this she knew.

  So Phelim and Ebba coexisted quietly, fondly, Ebba aware of the incipient difference in her child. As he grew older, she heard him sing in the Travellers’ language when she had taught him none and chanting rhymes that weren’t childish and in an altogether different language she could fear. In his turn Phelim loved Ebba fiercely. He had been made aware early on that Ebba was his step-mother and he minded little as he had seen foundling lambs mothered up with ewes whose own lambs had died and he thought there was a similarity in his own story. In addition Ebba’s unique nature, that of an exceptional mortal wise-woman and healer thrilled him and he felt comfortable in her presence, watching with studious care when she talked to the elements or mixed potions.

  Ebba’s skill was linked with the earth and the air, with fire and water. She talked to the wind and received answers from the sea. Squire Merrick considered Ebba’s domicile a blessing on the fecundity of his estate. She kept he and his workers happy and safe, but none in the demesnes, neither worker nor Squire, were aware that for all of Phelim’s life, the carlin had never revealed his true identity to him or anyone else, a secret that forever weighed heavily on the conscience of the woman.

  The evenings were long with light on Maria Island. It gave the inhabitants pleasure to eat a meal after a hard day’s work and then watch the sun set, leaning back on a settle against a west-facing wall, warm with the day’s heat. Ebba would sit in the arbor at the front of her house, Grimalkin, the white cat, at her side. She would light her pipe, filling it with a sweet weed and puff away, a glass of the best of her wines within fingertip’s reach. She often had a vision at this most relaxed of times. Good or bad, it never worried her deeply. Later she would note it down and if necessary impart a precaution to whomever it concerned.

  Phelim would spend such evenings lying on a tussocky headland overlooking his favorite cove, head propped on folded arms, staring out to the Passage. This evening a strong seabreeze herded waves from the windward side of the island and tossed his hair, revealing the odd wine tint that streaked it here and there as if he spent days and years in the sun. As he watched, grey and blue shadows chased each other across the water and gannets and gulls skimmed the surface, the cries of larger seabirds filling the air as they jostled for position on the rocky coast.

  Sandbanks rose up and skirted the shore of the cove, shielding it from the onslaught of coastal grasses. Clear water lapped at the edges of the bay, reminding Phelim of a delicately coloured glass pitcher the Squire had ordered from a Venichese artisan. He heard tell of these far flung places when journeymen took advantage of Ebba’s hospitality and sometimes the need to travel, to find the end of the cord that pulled at his soul was so strong his feet could almost begin walking before his mind could catch up. But he would look at Ebba grinding her herbs to a paste, delivering a child, seeing some message in the drift of a leaf or a cloud in the sky and his heart would tug his soul and thence his feet and he would settle again.

  He sighed with relative content and focused on a swell of dark blue wafting past the headland and his attention sharpened as he discerned a shape forcing through the wave towards his cove rather than being pushed away to the far distant shore. He put a hand to his forehead to shield his eyes from the glare of the setting sun.

  An unusual vessel approached. Shaped like a dug-out but coated in animal skins like a coracle, it zigzagged toward the shore, the ends of the paddle hitting the water on either side with a thump as though the boatsman was exhausted, weak beyond belief. Rather than jumping up, Phelim lay very still and watched as the craft floundered around the headland. The rower, a girl Phelim thought, slumped for a second and he could see a small back heaving. And then the paddle dipped again and the vessel made for the shallows whereupon she clambered out, fell to her knees, staggered up and pulled the craft onto the wet sand by the side of a cluster of rocks. Grabbing a small bag from inside the hull, she passed a hand over the boat and it dissolved into a pile of dust on the sand.

  Unsurprised, Phelim knew this action was the right thing to do and that it was as strangely familiar to him as the action of breathing. What did distress him was the subsequent action of the slim young woman. She clutched the stuffed pack to her chest and began to cry as she leaned on one arm, the hand and fingers spread out over the rocks.

  The seashore was one of the places most feared by mortals with its conglomeration of malign water wights who could shape-change in order to devour a luckless soul as quickly as
a thief pockets a coin. On this evening a normal creature, neither malicious nor Other, sensed the fingertips trailing in the shallow rock pool and with blue spangles flashing, it wrapped six of its eight tiny tentacles around the fingers and wrist of the woman, to grip and bite hard.

  She gave a sharp cry, rubbed at the hand and then lurched up the beach. Within seconds she had fallen to her knees, groaning and sucking in vast gasps of air. Then she collapsed to lie very, very still.

  Chapter Two

  Phelim ran down over the rocks, through the sandy sags and swathes of samphyr, aware of the dangers of the rockpools. Before him the fragile chest heaved, dark eyes sightless, registering nothing of his presence. The slim hands clutching at the bag had long fingers that were chafed and red with blisters and the lips through which each agonized breath was sucked were split and dry. As Phelim’s glance searched the victim’s wrist, he saw it - the telltale carmine sucker marks from a tiny sea-spider. Within seconds the creeping freeze had started, within minutes rictus would occur and no air would be able to enter, the heart stopping dead.

  ‘Get Ebba, Spot, go,’ he ordered and the dog sprinted away in a skirl of sand. Phelim hefted the slight woman into his arms just as the final breath stopped, her eyes vacant and wide. Holding her close, her matted hair hanging in ropey skeins over his arm, he puffed air into the rigid lips as he had done for struggling newborn lambs, as he had seen Ebba do with human babes. Then he began to run awkwardly, stopping to puff, squeezing the chest against his own but gaining ground nevertheless. Her fingers had stiffened around the small shabby bag she had clutched moments earlier before her life had been so dramatically altered and Phelim despaired of saving her. So quick and powerful was the poison from the sea-creature that it could kill twenty men in three minutes, but he puffed and squeezed and ran anyway.