by Prue Batten
I turned to Gallivant but he had gone and so I climbed onto my bed and lay back, allowing thoughts of Kholi’s love and affection to fill my mind, overflowing to every dark, damaged corner, to lull me to a deep, unbroken sleep - the first for many weeks.
Chapter Fourteen
Severine had taken a meal in her chamber at the hunting lodge and now sat in a rocking chair by the window gazing out at the night-shrouded Styx Forest. The chair suited her mood. For someone who was always frenetic, always in agitated motion, this allowed Severine to sit, to be in motion and soothed all in one.
It was a graceful piece of furniture, for if Severine had anything worthwhile, she had an eye for good pieces to fill her houses. The chair came from a woodcarver’s market in Trevallyn and suited the lodge, the timber mellow with age and the arms, seat and back lovingly upholstered in excellent canvas work - a tapestry of fruit and vegetables.
Her forehead creased as she pulled at the weave with one hand. In the other, she had a piece of silk and she took her agitated fingers away from smoothing the wool of the canvas work to smooth out the silk. It was a tiny piece of Adelina’s discarded embroidery. A pansy - inky violet and yellow with a leaf in emerald green. Crawling across the leaf was the ubiquitous ladybird and under the leaf, directly on the silk, a black money-spider sitting in a silver web. The work was perfect and yet Adelina had consigned it to the rubbish. Why? Severine knew the truth of her own embroidery skill, its ragged unevenness, its lack of finesse. So why would Adelina throw something this perfect away? She growled. What was it about the wretched woman that so disturbed her to the point of murder? Jealousy? She tipped her toes against the ground and set the chair gently rocking again, rejecting the idea of such an infantile emotion. Scrunching up Adelina’s rubbish, she consigned it to the floor at her feet.
Next door, Gertus would be bent in a dusty huddle over the stones trying to decipher their meaning. She smiled the cold grimace that never reached her eyes and which barely touched the corners of her lips, lifting a crystal goblet to sip the golden wine inside.
She drifted on nostalgia, reviewing her thrilling ascent to this point. Not long after Gertus arrived in her life, she had fretted about the Count’s voracious need of her, as though to him the sexual act defined his manhood. Luther suggested a solution to her problem with the calm and deliberate manner for which she payed him. That night, after giving the Count a warm glass of milk laced with enough belladonna to stop an ox, Severine lay in bed listening to the old man’s rasping, erratic breath. At one point his eyes flew open and he clawed his way to her side of the bed whereupon she jumped out to stand and watch him. He knew. Oh he knew as every sinew, muscle and nerve screamed in his silent death-throes that his wife was a murderer. His eyes stared back sightlessly in the end, and she waited for some measure of emotion to bite - guilt, horror, dismay, even sorrow. Instead, euphoria swept like a wave of applause through her body, affirming her dreams and the process that must secure those dreams. It hadn’t hurt at all and she knew she could do it again.
Where does this emotional lack come from? She shrugged her shoulders at the empty room as she reminisced, and thanked the Fates she’d been blessed with such cool carelessness because it made everything simple. It also marked the massive difference between her and her peers. Changeling indeed!
Thus she entered a wealthy widowhood; with two servants literally worth their weight in gelt and power that others... she laughed, Nay, even Others, would die for.
The evening Gertus happened into her life, not long before the old Count had ‘died’, she couldn’t sleep. Slipping from the despised marital bed, she had wrapped herself in a silken shawl and crept along the darkened corridor of their palazzo on the Grand Canal of Veniche. In the moonlight filtering through elongated windows, dreary, equally elongated and bearded faces of bedecked ancestors peered down at her. White marble busts on carved plinths glimmered in the moonbeams slanting across the terrazzo floors. Bare-footed, she proceeded like a wraith to the library, to her favourite tomes, because she was lured to the presence of stories on Others like those lured by the poppy. Already her mind was far from the constraints and distrait of her husband’s demands, scanning line after line of the grimoires in her possession. If only…
A queer glow stopped her in her tracks. Flitting about inside the doorway of the library was a small gold luminescence. At first she thought it was the Teine Sidhe, the tiny will o’ the wisps of fire and light. But on quick reflection she recalled they were creatures of enchanted forests like the Luned. Not the canals and watery alleys of Veniche. Her breath caught as she crept to the door.
A strange figure slipped from one wall-hung picture to the next. Lifting, looking underneath. Moving on. Then to boxes, lidded bowls and caskets. Opening, closing. But becoming anxious. Swearing as each item apparently held nothing - some quaint, gutteral language.
It’s Other. Severine’s heart jumped. He’s a goblin looking for jewelry, gems. He approached the door and she slipped behind an arras, laying her magnificent black pearl and diamond betrothal ring on a table where it caught the light of the moon and glimmered in a beguiling way. She held her breath.
The goblin passed through the door into the moonlight-striped corridor. He took a cautious step forward but then paused, his nose twitching as if sniffing a scent. His head turned and his eyes scanned the furniture against the walls.
The diamond flashed with white fire and the pearl gleamed. The goblin’s breath gushed as his hand reached out.
Severine grabbed. She fastened her hand over the unfortunate’s wrist and he shrieked like a young girl.
‘Be quiet and you shall have more.’ Severine’s urgent whisper cut through the cry like wire as the word ‘more’ could be seen settling into the malicious wight’s consciousness.
‘More? Like what?’ His globular eyes narrowed.
‘This?’ Severine pulled the opal pendant from the neck of her fine lawn nightgown. He gazed at its pure-as-milk-surface, the red and blue veins of fire streaming deep inside like some subterranean vein of hot lava. The goblin sighed as if it were the most desired jewel in the world and he reached his other hand to touch it.
‘No,’ she said, more hiss than whisper. ‘You work for me and I will pay you in gems and gold. No work, no touch.’
The goblin shook off her clasp and moved backward away from her, all the time staring at her, gauging the price of the passion. His hands wrung themselves over and over. ‘As you say,’ he said finally. ‘A payment up front though.’ He bent his head in a quasi obeisance, holding his hand out, wiggling his fingers.
‘Shall we make it the ring then?’ Severine held the pearl and diamond geegaw out.
‘Mistress,’ he smiled the way a sycophant would, the wrinkled fingers closing over the jewelry. ‘I am your humble servant.’
They had come so far together and now he was next door sliding not precious gems but arcane stones around under his fingers, trying to find the gates to what Severine perceived as her long lost home - the world of Faeran. She rocked back and forth.
Chapter Fifteen
Wood knocked against wood, a dull sound but repetitive enough to wake the sleeper in the dory. Phelim raised his head from the stiff, blood-encrusted hands that had been his pillow. In the gloaming he glimpsed a jetty, a small construction the width of a man’s shoulder. He rubbed his bleary eyes and lowered his head.
But wait! A jetty… gloaming.
The dark cavern glowed with small flitting lights that beckoned to Phelim, enticing, leading away into darkness.
He warred with himself, wanting to sleep but knowing he should move. Every part of his body ached and placing a blistered hand to his head he grimaced as it came away smeared with blood. Feeling more carefully, he fingered a gash amongst his hair, three or four inches long. Immortal or not, he understood he must tend his injuries and that a dank, dirty cave was not the place for such ministrations. The flickering lights waxed and waned and Phelim pulled himself out of t
he boat.
As he bent to grasp the mooring rope, it snaked out of its own accord and wrapped itself thrice round a pole and then looped under and over into an firm knot.
‘Phelim, son of Ebba,’ the irony echoed as he spoke aloud. ‘This is such a voyage of discovery.’ He stepped up the well-lit stair, the lights brightening as he approached and fading to darkness after he had passed. The broad stairs were cut into sandstone, the walls mellow in the light, and the air occasionally wafted a fragrance despite the dankness of the sea air - a promise of something.
He pushed a heavy studded door ajar and a soft breeze teased with the smell of meadow and brook. Stepping outside, he noticed dawn had broken and that the light was as gilded as that of the cavern glimmerings but wider, dusting everything. A riverbank lay clothed in thick grass and wildflowers. His confusion grew - that such a paradise should exist so close to the mayhem of oceans and storms. The waterway before him stretched in a broad swathe and was edged with the eddying branches of willow. He could hear Ebba’s voice, another poetic verse designed to educate Phelim beyond the language of the farmyard so long ago.
‘Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver,
Through the wave that runs for ever,
By the island in the river.’
Ah Ebba, he thought. So apt.
In the middle of the watery sward was such an island, covered from end to end in a forest of willow, aspen and beech. From further along the banks a musical sound enticed him and he walked to a glade, close enough to the river to see and hear the chuntering of water over rock but far enough away for the meadow grass to be dry and pleasant to sit on. A feast had been laid out and Phelim looked for servitors but there were none. Despite his stomach churning with foreboding, he took a wedge of cheese and bread between cautious fingers. Encouraged by the flavour he drank wine, finishing the meal by eating fresh apricots and figs the like of which he had never savoured. Lying back on the grass, he pillowed his head on a fallen log and sighed, concern momentarily abandoned.
Phelim of the Faeran. He closed his eyes and the sun warmed him, the words ‘of the Faeran’ resonating through the soporific glow. Nothing he knew of the Faeran could make him glad he was one except for the valour of the girl, that fated lady of the souls. She had been exceptional, of that he was sure as he pieced together her journey with the fragments relayed from Ebba’s urisk. But I am more mortal than Faeran. It’s what I choose, what I know, what I prefer. And I miss Ebba. More than I could possibly imagine. The gentle silence of woods and water filled the surroundings and he found that he could forgive his stepmother. Despite the agony of his displacement and subsequent confusion, he knew loved her for her care and ultimately for her honesty.
But his equanimity lasted only a minute as he ran eyes over his surroundings. Hy-Breasil - he had heard the fisherman talk of the Floating Isles but no one had ever returned to tell of being in such an enchanted place. When did mortals ever return from the Other world with sanity enough to explain or discourse on anything, if they returned at all?
Hy-Breasil was well known in legend, believed to be a sacred place in the Other world. But then perhaps it is an Other paradise where the souls of the departed come to everlasting peace and rest and perhaps I am dead. Phelim’s repast of earlier sank in his belly. But no, if I were dead and in such a place as this, then I think my purpose would leave me and I would rest in peace. I would not be deliberating the whys and wherefores of my situation. He sat listening to the sounds of birds, the water and the breeze sighing through the trees as a slight niggle itched the former shepherd like fleas in a dog’s coat.
What if the Isles are more sinister? What if I am marooned here and can never leave? He fingered the chamois bag. If this is an Other Paradise, could I not just release the souls now? Why continue on a journey that promises to be fraught when I can just open the bag, go back to the dory and return the way I came. He fiddled with the knot of the cord.
As if they read his thoughts, the souls and the bag chilled dramatically and he shivered. He pulled the cord over his head and thrust the bag away. He preferred not to think on the contents for if he did anger would spew forth that he should be forced from his home in the pursuit of some sort of Fate for which he cared nothing.
Silence soothed him and eventually he dozed in the warmth of the morning. Bees buzzed and butterflies flittered but there was no sign of any other like himself, man or woman. It was as if he and he alone were the only person on the Isles.
He woke an hour later and lay still as he oriented himself, glancing at the sun and watching the sky and clouds. How strange this place is, he thought as he sat up. No sign of a living soul, nor dead, and yet I am served, but by whom? He tried to hold the thought and think on it, but a roaring of water in the river drew his attention.
The noise of rapids rushed from the upper bend and with spume and froth and the violent coughing of the river against the banks, an eddy shot downstream, rippling, swirling, sucking everything that floated into a vicious vortex. Bark, flowerheads, leaves, feathers, all spun frantically and then disappeared in the corkscrew of the whirlpool, leaving nothing behind. Having demolished all in its path, the unseelie current smoothed itself until the river was a calm swathe burbling through the meadows. He wondered if the island had its own way of speaking. Phelim son of Ebba, cease this chitter-chatter! You are here. Let that be an end to it. Rest and enjoy what you are offered and do not offend.
The cloying salt on his face and arms itched and a swim on the river’s edge tempted him so he slipped down the bank, discarding the sea-stiff clothes. His shoulders and hands throbbed with weals from the rope and on his cheek a deep gouge from the split tongue on the end of Huon’s whip oozed blood, whilst the gash on his head had dried his hair into clotted lumps.
He waded into the river and allowed the now gentle eddies to wash over his naked, bruised body, unafraid of the secret currents in the deeper water as he had been a strong swimmer from childhood. Thus he closed his eyes and the cool stream slipped past his skin like silk over flesh - seductive and erotic. When he eventually glanced upon his arms, he was unsurprised to see the scarring gone and slid a hand along the unblemished musculature of his shoulders. In the same way that he had been unperturbed when Lhiannon had ‘vanished’ her little boat, knowing deep within that such things were right and proper, so he expected such glamour to manifest in this place. His cheek when he rubbed was scar-less, but rough with a day’s growth of whisker, and his scalp as smooth and firm as it had been when he left home. He snorted softly and heard a low laugh.
‘Strong powers, Ebba’s Phelim.’
He dashed for the bank and flung on his breeches, his cheeks warming as the woman’s melodious voice flowed from beneath the willows. There followed a faint chuckle. ‘Do not be shy. I am beyond your charms. Although I see how well formed you are and how easy it must be to love you.’
‘Where are you?’ Phelim hastily pulled on the rest of his clothes, aware of their new softness but too concerned to waste time in examination. ‘Show yourself!’
‘Why, Phelim? It is enough that you have a voice to commune with. And we have much that we must talk about, so rest you easy. It is not necessary that you see me.’
‘I’ll not talk with anyone who is afraid to show me their face. Adieu.’ He thrust the cord of the bag over his head and tucked the chamois under his shirt against his bare chest and began to walk away from the river toward the door of the cave. As he took a step up the incline, a searing burn arced along his ribcage and he grasped at his shirt as if to fling it and the concealed bag from his body. ‘Aine!’ He winced with the awful pain as the pouch pulled away from scalded, gummy skin.
‘Ah. So the souls tell you that you must listen when you are spoken to. Hearken, Phelim.’
Phelim slumped to his knees, breathing hard, trying to hold the bag and the folds of his shirt away from the deep burns. ‘Then speak, for if you are the kind who must torture and
burn to make your point, I would prefer it was over quickly.’
The amorphous voice shifted to come from in front of him, further up the slope toward the door. ‘Go back to the river, Phelim. You will find if you step back, the pain will ease and you will be of a mind to listen.’
He felt a rush of something soft and pleasant flowing past him and heard a rattle as if a breeze blew through the dry seed cases of the trees so that he was reminded of the crushed rustle of a piece of Ebba’s favourite taffeta that she had hung over the back of a chair. He turned and stepped back down to the river, the burns fading in intensity, until as he stood on the banks, it was as though nothing had happened. Rubbing cautiously at his side, he cast an intense look over his surroundings, thinking there nestled a dark shadow under a swathe of willow.
‘Sit, Phelim. Be at ease. Nothing will hurt you now and we have much to say.’
‘So you said. And yet I can’t imagine what I would have to say to a disembodied voice that has neither the courage nor conviction to show itself.’
The voice laughed with delight, a sound that caressed every sense Phelim possessed. ‘They chose you well, my friend. You have backbone.’
The voice once again came from behind him and he turned to look, his body shivering with trills of fear and excitement. ‘Who chose well? What do you say?’
‘You do well to fear me, Phelim. Because I can do as much as the souls or worse if I choose. But I think we can be friends so shall we be calm?’
He looked up from where he had sat on the edge of the riverbank and spied a pair of delicate feet clad in dark Raji ankle boots, their upper edges touching the folds of a full skirt. At his eye-level, the skirt was embroidered with silver trees which were frosted as if by star and moonlight and as he gazed at the detail laid against an indigo background, the daylight surrounding him darkened until he could tell neither the sky from the skirt and felt himself falling into dark blue almost black heavenly depths. The sky as he raised his eyes further, became studded with stars and swathes of delicate cloud and as he looked up further still, a pale face stared down, as pale as the moon and as lovely, the woman’s hair drifting like dove-grey mist, this way and that, whilst stars glittered and flickered in the celestial mass. Was it a woman, or was he asleep? Did he lie on the grass in the night and stare at a face or at the moon?
