Lys lay on her back as they attached the wood to her and tried to force back the panic that urged her to struggle. Once the wood became soaked it would hold her down in her watery grave. They pushed her into the thick muck and left her to sink into the abyss.
Eyes closed. The popping sound of earth saturated with water filled her ears. She heard someone calling her name. Lys opened her eyes. Her father stood over her with a Trank in his hand. She smiled at him and opened her mouth. He held her head up as she drank and when she had finished, he disappeared.
Lys relaxed her senses and let her mind escape the fen. After a time she felt nothingness come upon her. She rose and walked in search of Ankou. She found him sitting a short distance away, as if waiting for her. He stood and held out his hand as she approached.
“Come,” he said. “I have prepared a place for you.”
“And my children?”
Ankou bent to face her fully, his expression grave. “Those who must suffer will be guided as you have been. I will bring them.”
Satisfied, she followed him into the depths of the Anderwelt to await the arrival of her sons and daughters, one after the other.
****
Afterword
‘The Raven’s Curse’ was initially inspired by several visits to Brittany and an appreciation for the unique culture that the Breton people are striving to maintain. Those experiences, in turn, sparked an intense fascination with the Continental Celts. The story idea grew out of a natural desire to flesh out the back-story for the Schattenreich fantasy series. The completed story provided an unexpected, but vital, facet to the series itself. And it was a terrific chance to write some historical fantasy. More such tales are planned.
Biography
Sharon Kae Reamer is an American seismologist working at the University of Cologne, Germany. Sharon writes speculative fiction and has recently finished her third (as yet unpublished) novel in the Schattenreich fantasy series (www.sharonreamer.com). In her spare time, she also works as an assistant editor for the e-zine Allegory. She lives with her husband, son and Ramses the cat, on the outskirts of Cologne.
****
Katharine Kerr
The Lass From Far Away
Eldidd, 1060
“You ask me if the gods truly exist. Consider this: human hands make a glass vessel, then fill it with mead. Does the bit of Rhwmani glass have power in itself? Of course not! Yet the mead will make many a strong man drunk.”
~ The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid
On a summer morning she walked out of the sea onto the beach near the town of Cannobaen. Water trickled down her pale brown face and oozed from her straight dark hair. Her thin linen shift stuck to her body, all skin and bone except for her swollen stomach. For a long time she stood, merely stood on the hot sand and looked at the cliffs with bewildered hazel eyes. With a sigh she sat down and continued studying the cliffs as if they might tell her what to do.
Some yards down the beach, black rocks jutted from the ebbing tide. With their long blue skirts tied half-way up their thighs, a woman and a half-grown lass were clambering over them to harvest the bright green seaweed, as fine and sleek as a horse’s mane, that grew below the water line. The younger paused, straightened up to rest her back, and looked idly around her.
“Mam,” Olwen said, “there’s a castaway come out of the water.”
The older woman balanced her basket of laver weed on one hip and looked where the younger pointed.
“By the gods!” Cobylla, the soapmaker’s wife, said. “You’re right enough. I’d not heard of any ships going down. Let’s go see what we can do for the poor thing.”
When they gained the dry beach they paused to untie their skirts, then slogged across the hot soft sand. Although they called out greetings, the lass never turned her head, not even when they reached her.
“Look at her!” Cobylla said. “Starved and exhausted, poor thing.” She handed her basket to Olwen, then knelt in front of the lass. “Here now, lass. Let’s get you to safety.”
The lass raised her head and looked at her. Flies were crawling across her cheek. Cobylla reached out and flicked them away.
“From the look of her,” Olwen said, “she doesn’t understand a word you’re saying. Here, her skin’s brown. She must be from Bardek.”
“You’re right enough, and I’ll wager she only speaks that nasty strange tongue of theirs. You’ve got the water bottle. Hand it over.”
The bottle, made of leather boiled in wax, hung from a thong at Olwen’s kirtle. She untied it, shaking it to judge how full it might be. At the sound of sloshing water the lass jerked her head around to stare, her cracked lips half-parted.
“Now she understood that sound well enough,” Olwen said. “She must be near dead from thirst.”
Cobylla took out the stopper and handed the bottle to the lass, whose hands shook so badly that she nearly dropped and spilled it. Cobylla grabbed it, then helped her hold it to her mouth. The lass drank in long gulps, pausing only to gasp for air, until the bottle ran dry. When she let go of the bottle, she whispered a few words. Although Olwen knew no Bardekian, she could guess that they added up to “my thanks”.
“Well, now.” Cobylla got up, shaking her head. “We can’t leave her here.” She held out a hand.
The lass hesitated, then slowly reached out and took the proffered hand. Cobylla pulled her up only to have her stagger and nearly fall. When Cobylla put an arm around her waist, the lass leaned against her.
“She’s trembling, poor little thing,” Cobylla said. “She’ll never be able to reach the town.”
“I’ll run on ahead and fetch one of the men,” Olwen said. “She’ll be easy to carry, I wager. She’s so thin.”
Olwen, however, found help nearer to hand than back in Cannobaen. She crossed the beach, climbed the decrepit wooden stairway that snaked up the cliff, then at the top paused to catch her breath. A wild meadow crowned the cliffs with tall grass, stretching a good half a mile inland. A dirt road meandered through the meadow, and some yards along it Olwen saw a mule, tethered and grazing next to a big pile of canvas packs.
“The herbman!” she sang out. “Now this is a bit of luck!”
At the sound of her voice the herbman himself appeared, rising from the waist-high grass where he’d been kneeling. In one hand he held a trowel made of silvery metal and in the other, a clump of little green plants trailing muddy roots. He was a tall man with ice-blue eyes, an untidy thatch of white hair, and frog spots thick on his face and hands.
“And just why am I such a lucky sight?” he said. “Has someone been taken ill?”
“Indeed, good Nevyn, or stranger than ill,” Olwen said. “My mam and me, we were a-gathering of the laver weed, and there was this castaway, come out of the water. She’s half-dead, poor thing.”
“Ye gods! Here, I’ve not heard of any shipwrecks.”
“No more have I. It’s a strange thing.”
Nevyn tucked his trowel into the pocket of his muddy brown trousers, then walked with her to the edge of the cliff. Down on the beach, Cobylla had managed to get the lass to the foot of the stairs. When Olwen called out, Cobylla looked up and waved.
“She can’t climb,” Cobylla yelled up. “She’s much too weak.”
As if to prove the point, the Bardekian dropped to her knees on the sand with the suddenness of a sack of meal falling from a wagon.
“Here, hold this.” Nevyn handed Olwen the clump of herbs.
The old man trotted down the steps with a vigor surprising in one his age. When he reached the women below, he picked the lass up as easily as if she’d indeed been that sack of meal. He said a few words to Cobylla, then carried the lass up the steps while Olwen watched, amazed. Cobylla followed more slowly, puffing and panting all the way. At the top Nevyn set the lass down in the grass; she stared up at him, seemed to be about to speak, then merely stared the more. Nevyn turned, reached down, and gave Cobylla a hand up over the edge. Cobylla put her laver baske
t down and began to wipe her sweaty face on the wide sleeve of her dress.
“Well, it was lucky, all right,” Nevyn said to Olwen. “That I was here, I mean. You have my thanks for rescuing this poor child.”
“Why?” Olwen said. “Is it that you know her or suchlike?”
“I don’t. It’s just that she’s very near death.”
“I did wonder about that.” Olwen was about to ask more, but she glanced at Cobylla and found her mother waving a frantic hand behind Nevyn’s back. Olwen knew that wave; it meant hold your tongue or get a good slap for disobeying. Still, she couldn’t resist one more question. “She comes from far away, doesn’t she?”
“Very far,” Nevyn said. “Hand me back those herbs, and I’ll just be taking them and her both back to the dun with me.”
Olwen and Cobylla stood together and watched Nevyn saddle and fetch his mule. Although the canvas packs looked bulky, close up Olwen could see how lightly they sat on the animal’s back. She held the mule’s lead rope while Nevyn lifted the lass up and settled her behind the pack saddle. Olwen got her biggest surprise, though, when Nevyn spoke to the lass in the strange language: Bardekian, it had to be, because the lass answered him readily enough.
“Just telling her to hang on tight,” Nevyn said to Olwen. “My thanks again, and we’ll be off.”
Nevyn strode away, leading the mule through the grass toward the road. The lass clung to the swaying canvas as the mule picked its way over the uneven ground.
“It’s a good thing you held your tongue.” Cobylla whispered. “I’d not have you prying into old Nevyn’s affairs.”
“What? Why not?”
“Why not, she says, and her my own daughter!” Cobylla rolled her eyes heavenward. “The old man’s a sorcerer, that’s why! Ask too many questions and get changed right into a frog, most like, or somewhat else nasty.”
“So that tale’s true, Mam? I’d heard it, but―”
“I’ve had it on the best authority, from Lady Lovyan’s own maid. And would the noble-born be sheltering a common old herbman in their dun and treating him like a lord? Of course not! But Nevyn always takes our lady’s hospitality when he’s in Cannobaen, doesn’t he? So, well, then, there you are!”
By this time Nevyn and his laden mule had reached the dirt road. Olwen stared, her mouth slack as a half-wit’s, as they turned onto it, heading west, an ordinary old man leading an ordinary brown mule ― but then, there was nothing ordinary about the lass from far away, and he had spoken to her in her own strange tongue.
“Come along,” Cobylla snapped. “Let’s get along home. We need to get this laver into brine before it shrivels in the heat.”
Although Olwen followed her mother, she looked back every now and then until at last, Nevyn and his mule had passed beyond her sight.
****
Some miles west of town, Dun Cannobaen stood near the edge of the cliffs. In most ways it was a typical Deverry dun; a high stone wall enclosed a ward, cluttered with sheds and pig-sties, stables and a smithy, while in the middle rose a squat round broch tower. At the moment, a dragon pennant fluttered at the top of the broch to show that Lady Lovyan, wife to Gwerbret Tingyr of Aberwyn, was in residence. Outside the walls, however, rose a marvel: a slender tower some hundred and fifty feet tall, wound round by a flight of stone steps: the Cannobaen light. At night a lightkeeper tended a fire on top of the tower to warn ships of the dangerous shoals just off-shore.
Bardek merchant ships came close to wrecking themselves on those shoals even in good weather. In the winter, when the Cannobaen light guttered and turned faint in the driving winds and rain, a ship that left its departure too late in the year would come to grief, generally losing all hands. One summer storm had swept over Dun Cannobaen just a few days past, but fortunately the light had held steady, and no ships had foundered, not as far as Nevyn knew. The lass clinging to the pack saddle presented something of a mystery.
When Nevyn led his mule through the dun’s gate, a page came running, followed by Lady Lovyan’s youngest son. Lord Rhodry Maelwaedd hovered on the edge of manhood, a slender lad turned positively thin by a bad illness the winter past. Although he had the typical Eldidd coloring of raven-dark hair and cornflower blue eyes, he was unusually handsome, almost girlishly beautiful with a blush of tanned skin over his high cheekbones. He bowed to Nevyn, then stood staring at the lass.
“A castaway,” Nevyn said, “or at least, she came out of the sea this morning. It looks like you’ve been taking the sun.”
“I have,” Rhodry said, “just as you ordered. Here, shall I carry that poor little lass inside for you?”
“I can carry her myself.” Nevyn tossed him the leadrope of the mule. “You might stable Old Brown here for me. Just leave the packs on the pack saddle. I’ll fetch them in a bit.”
Rhodry may have been noble-born, but like everyone else in the dun, he did whatever Nevyn told him to do. The page hurried off to find Lady Lovyan. Nevyn lifted the Bardekian lass off the mule’s back, then carried her inside to the great hall, a round chamber filling the entire ground floor of the broch. On opposite sides of the hall, a group of tables stood by a hearth, a battered and chipped cluster of plank tables and benches by the servants’ and warband’s hearth, a nicely polished table and chairs at the honor hearth.
At the servant’s hearth a shabby lass stood stirring a simmering kettle that held stew from the smell of it. Too rich, Nevyn decided, for a patient who had starved for several days. He carried the lass over to the table of honor, set her down on a chair, then strode over to the opposite hearth.
“Is there breakfast porridge left?” he said.
“Always, my lord,” the servant said.
“Fetch me a bowlful, will you? But water it down. It needs to be very thin.”
When Nevyn returned to the table of honor, he found the castaway sitting in the straw on the floor.
“Here!” he said in Bardekian. “Wasn’t that chair comfortable enough?”
“I can’t sit there.” She whispered so softly that he had to lean over to hear her.
“You were told you had to sit below any free man or woman?”
She nodded.
“What’s your name, girl?”
She never answered, merely stared at the straw on the floor. Nevyn would have continued questioning her, but Lady Lovyan was coming down the winding stairway in the center of the great hall. This stairway was a piece of dwarven work, and something of a marvel in itself, a tight spiral of iron rather than the usual stone.
Although she’d grown stout over the years, Lovyan was still a handsome woman with just one thick streak of gray in her dark hair. That morning she’d dressed in blue, with a kirtle in the blue and green plaid of Aberwyn round her waist. She stood by the chair at the head of the table of honor and considered the lass, who kept her gaze firmly on the floor.
“So this is our castaway?” Lovyan said. “The poor child!”
“She is,” Nevyn said. “She’s utterly exhausted.”
“No doubt.” Lovyan paused to sit down, smoothing her dresses under her. “We had that one bad storm, but I certainly haven’t heard of any shipwrecks. She comes from far away, doesn’t she?”
“She does,” Nevyn said. “Bardek, in fact. Fortunately I know their language. I studied physick there some years back.”
“Fortunate, indeed! Do tell her she’s safe here.”
“I already have. She’s either too drained to speak much, or she’s simply not willing to tell me her name. Huh.” He paused to consider the problem. “Now, if there wasn’t any shipwreck, she may have simply fallen from the deck or even jumped. I do know she was a slave. There’s a brand right there on the back of her neck.”
Lovyan winced with a little shudder of disgust. The lass sat stone-still between them on the floor, her hands clasped in her lap and her gaze fixed on the empty air. When Nevyn opened the second sight, he could see that her pale grey aura hung shrunken around her ― except in one location. Aroun
d her swollen belly flickered light of a silvery-blue.
The servant hurried over, carrying a wooden bowl. She curtsied to her ladyship, handed Nevyn the bowl, and scurried off again. Nevyn inspected the bowl ― lukewarm oat porridge, liberally swirled with butter and thinned with boiled water ― then knelt beside the girl.
“Can you swallow a spoonful of this?” he said in Bardekian. “It’s very smooth and should go down easily, even with your mouth so cracked and sore.”
When he held out a full spoonful, she turned her head away.
“Come now, surely you must be starved after being in the water for so long.”
She neither moved nor spoke.
“You’re with child.” Nevyn brought out his best weapon. “Do you want your child to die?”
She jerked her head up.
“I won’t hurt you,” Nevyn went on. “No one here is going to turn you over to your master. You’re escaping from slavery, aren’t you?”
At that she looked up and turned toward him. When he held out the spoon again, she took the mouthful. Her lips moved as she chewed the food and swallowed it.
“No,” she spoke at last. “Not escaping.” She smiled, but there was something terrifying in that smile, her thin lips drawn back from strong white teeth, her eyes far too wide and unblinking. “There’s no escaping now.”
“Well, we’ll just see about that! If they come looking for you, they’ll have our ladyship’s troop of soldiers to deal with.”
The Phantom Queen Awakes Page 9
