The Phantom Queen Awakes

by Mark S. Deniz

  That night, after everyone in the dun but the lightkeeper had gone to bed, Nevyn retired to his chamber just above the women’s hall. He lay down on his bed, crossed his arms over his chest, and summoned his body of light, a man-shaped creation of bluish-silvery astral substance, joined to his physical body by a silver cord. When he transferred his consciousness over to it, he could see with astral eyes, a far more powerful dweomer than the etheric second sight. All around him the stone walls of the dun glistened black. Outside the window the air pulsed with flecks of silver light, and the stars had grown huge and swollen, hovering over the earth.

  Nevyn drifted out of the window in his chamber and sank down until he came to one of the windows of the women’s hall. He could pass right through the oxhide covering and sail across the hall, where the wooden furniture and floor covering of woven rushes still gleamed with traces of the red-brown vegetable aura that their materials had extruded in life. Evy had left the door of her little chamber open. Nevyn drifted in, took up a position at the ceiling, and studied her sleeping body. What he saw shocked him so much that he nearly snapped back to his own body in the chamber upstairs.

  He steadied himself in his body of light, then sank down a few feet in order to see more clearly. He could barely discern her aura and that of the child through the black astral tangle around her. Like a huge cloud of thorns, black spiky lines surrounded her and dug through the greenish glow of her aura into her flesh. With sharp tendrils they grew into or perhaps out of her etheric double, binding her round, imprisoning her in a web of darkness, sucking life and light from her aura and from, or so it seemed, her very soul. The ritual had netted its prey for the Dark Goddess, sure enough.

  Nevyn left the chamber and floated back to his physical body. He glided down the silver cord, reunited consciousness and flesh, then banished the body of light. For a long while he lay still, thinking over the vision. He had seen his defeat, and it sickened him. He could never banish those black forces without harming her. If he went back to the astral to strip them away, her life-force would gush out and bleed along with them, just as pulling a barbed spear out of a warrior’s side will rip out his life by making the wound ten times the worse.

  At length he got up and went over to the window; he pulled back the oxhide covering and leaned onto the sill. Although the winter air bit him with cold fangs, it was a clean thing, natural and pure, unlike what he’d seen in the chamber below. He wanted to scream his frustration into the wind and fill the sky with curses. Instead he took a deep breath and calmed himself. With the physical cold of the night air came the touch of another sort of chill ― an omen warning, that somehow Evy herself presaged ― something. As usual, the omen flickered in shadow rather than displayed itself in plain light. Somehow, some time, perhaps soon, perhaps years away, something or someone related to her would come his way, and it would bring more evil with it.

  “My curse upon whoever did this to her!” Nevyn said to the wind. “Blow him evil! May he rot in the lowest hell!”

  Distantly he heard ravens, cawing in what sounded to his ears as triumph, though they rarely if ever flew during the night. With a snarl Nevyn stepped back and let the oxhide flap down over the window, shutting out the cold and their chatter both.

  Not long after, on the shortest day of winter, when a storm raged around Cannobaen, the cook and the groom’s wife helped Evy deliver a baby boy, as small and delicate as his mother, but healthy withal. When they brought Nevyn in to have a look the pair, he saw life in Evy’s eyes for the first time as she smiled down at her newborn, whom she named Mor, meaning ‘ocean’. Over the next few weeks, however, as her strength returned from the childbirth, her reserve returned with it, except when she was nursing or otherwise tending the baby.

  “He’s the one joy in her life,” Cook told Nevyn. “My daughter’s fair taken with the lad, too. She tends him when Evy’s about her work.”

  “But otherwise―”

  “Ye gods, Evy goes about as if she’s half-dead, the poor mite!”

  That’s because she is, Nevyn thought, but aloud he merely voiced a few platitudes about time and the healing of wounds.

  Yet though time passed at Dun Cannobaen, Evy grew no stronger. In late spring, about the time when Evy’s son Mor was eating his first solid food, Lady Lovyan and her retinue returned to Dun Cannobaen for an extended visit, riding in late one damp afternoon. Gwerbret Tingyr would join her, she told Nevyn, to take the sea air, once he’d adjudged the spring crop of legal cases.

  “He’s not well, Tingyr,” Lovyan said. “I’m glad he’s coming here, so you can have a look at him.”

  “He won’t listen to me,” Nevyn said, “no matter what I advise him to do.”

  “You’re right, of course, but at least I’ll know what’s wrong. That will be some comfort.”

  They were sitting at the table of honor in the great hall just before the dinner hour. A servant lass brought them a basket of fresh bread, a tankard of dark ale for Nevyn, and a silver cup of Bardek wine for Lovyan.

  “Welcome back, my lady,” the lass said with a curtsy.

  “My thanks.” Lovyan favored her with a smile, then turned in her chair to glance around the great hall. “Ah, there’s Cook’s daughter with a baby. His skin is so dark! Is that little Evy’s child?”

  “He is, my lady.”

  Omen cold gripped Nevyn with icy hands. “Where’s Evy herself?” he said.

  “Taking the lightkeeper’s dinner up to him, my lord.”

  Taking the dinner up a hundred and fifty slippery steps at twilight ― Nevyn shoved his chair back, leapt up, and ran out of the great hall. He charged across the ward, scattering dogs and servants as he ran, darted out the gates, and raced to the foot of the tower. The omen-cold made him shiver, but Evy was already coming down, swinging an empty dinner-pail in one hand, walking slowly, carefully, step by step. When he looked up at the sky, he saw three dark bird-shapes wheeling just under the pale gray clouds, but they were too distant for him to identify them as ravens. He waited, his heart knocking and raging in his chest, until at last she gained the ground and safety.

  “Is somewhat wrong?” Evy said to him. “You look ill, my lord.”

  “Naught of the sort.” Nevyn let out his breath in a long sigh. “I’d just as soon you let someone else take the lightkeeper’s dinner up to him after this, however.”

  She cocked her head to one side and looked so sincerely puzzled that he felt a flare of hope. Perhaps she’d decided to live, after all. Perhaps he could find some way to help her.

  In the morning the rain broke. The storm clouds began to clear when a strong south wind blew in, driving them off to the north. Nevyn got a bowl of porridge for his breakfast and took a seat near one of the windows of the great hall. A manservant pulled up the oxhide cover and let a shaft of sunlight fall across the table.

  “Most welcome, that is,” Nevyn said. “My thanks.”

  The servant smiled, then hurried away to speak to the chamberlain. When Nevyn glanced at the staircase, he saw Evy just coming down the tight spiral of the iron stairs. The cook’s young daughter came after, carrying the baby for her, and that act of kindness doomed Evy. In a flash of fear Nevyn shoved back his chair and stood just as ravens shrieked outside the window, three long raucous cries. Startled, Evy took a quick step back and missed the stair. Without making a sound, she tumbled from the high spiral of the stairway and fell with the crack of bone against iron and a hard grunt of breath as she hit the floor.

  Cook’s daughter screamed. The baby began to wail and sob. Nevyn rushed over, but Evy lay dead on the stone floor, her head twisted at an impossible angle. Blood oozed through her dark hair. She had hit her head and broken her neck in one swift blow. The Goddess was merciful, Nevyn thought, such mercy as the Dark One has.

  “No doubt she felt very little,” Nevyn told Lovyan that night. “She must have died in an instant.”

  “It’s still very sad,” Lovyan said. “What about the child? Can we find
him a wetnurse?”

  “Cook says he’s old enough to survive on porridge and boiled milk and the like now.” That’s why the ravens held off for all these months, Nevyn thought to himself. They knew they couldn’t let the lad die of hunger.

  “Well, a wetnurse would be better, at least to feed him once a day or so.” Lovyan paused to wipe a few tears from her eyes. “If you ever find out who worked that spell over our poor castaway, I’ll have Tingyr arrest and hang him.”

  “That would gladden my heart, indeed. But to all intents and purposes, Lovva, she came to us from the Otherlands, and now, alas, she’s gone back there to stay.”

  ****

  Afterword

  The material that I have shaped, over the years, into the Deverry novels has always had a life of its own. ‘The Lass from Far Away’ really should have been part of the revised Daggerspell in order to lead into the revised Darkspell. I did the revisions back in the late 1980s. Unfortunately, ‘Lass’ didn’t make an appearance until 2008, a bit on the late side to fit into my plans. I make no pretence of understanding why or how these things get written, except to point out the obvious, that fiction doesn’t proceed from the rational part of the mind.

  ****

  Biography

  Katharine Kerr spent her childhood in a Great Lakes industrial city and her adolescence in Southern California, from whence she fled to the San Francisco Bay Area just in time to join a number of the Revolutions then in progress. After fleeing those in turn, she became a professional story-teller and an amateur skeptic, who regards all True Believers with a jaundiced eye, even those who true-believe in Science. An inveterate loafer, baseball addict, and rock and roll fan, she begrudgingly spares time to write novels, including the Deverry series of historical fantasies or fantastical histories, depending on your point of view. She lives near San Francisco with her husband of many years and some cats.

  ****

  Peter Bell

  The Trinket

  They burned Gederus in the yard outside the barracks. Dawn had brought the first break in rain for ten days and the men, still cold and filthy from the construction work, cast anxious glances at the black weight of cloud that threatened to stamp out and drown the struggling flames. Those closest to the pyre stole a guilty pleasure from its warmth.

  All except Rufinius, who stood to attention at the head of the bonfire, his nostrils thick with the smell of pitch and roasting meat.

  “This man was the best of us!” His voice cracked open the still air. “A leader of men and a soldier of Rome! Today, we honor him.”

  He nodded to the priests, who stepped forward and began reciting the prayers for the dead. Rufinius did not listen. Instead, he narrowed his eyes against the smoke and surveyed the army standing ready around him. A full century of men, their plate armor dull and glassy in the pale sunlight, the auxiliary soldiers and craftsmen standing in a looser huddle farther out. Surrounding them all, the fledgling town of Isca Augusta rose black and skeletal from the churned clay of the earth.

  He tried to ease some circulation back into his toes and felt the pendant shift beneath his tunic. He could be rid of it in an instant, he realized. Just throw it on the fire with the other offerings and never mind what the woman might say. But even before he saw her, watching him from the crowd, he realized it was nothing more than a lazy idea. He had come too far and done too much to just throw the thing away.

  She stood at the rear of the crowd, one face among hundreds, but her unwavering stare stood out like a beacon, fixing him with an intensity that made him look away.

  With a slight start, he realized the priests had finished their ministrations and the men were waiting for him to continue. He cleared his throat.

  ****

  “You won’t get far.”

  It was a winter’s day in Londinium, the snow still thick on the ground, but if she felt the cold at all, she did not show it. Instead, she picked her way down the temple steps, her raven hair dusted with gray, watching him with a steady, almost bored eye that nevertheless made him pull himself up, as though he were being studied.

  “Rome is a long way, and the emperor’s justice travels more quickly than a deserter. You’ll never reach the coast.”

  An incriminating flash of shame took hold of him. “You’re mad, old woman! I’m not going anywhere except to my bunk. Away with you!”

  She laughed, and it was a sound like knives being drawn. He turned hurriedly away.

  “You think you’re the first?”

  She followed a few steps behind him, speaking loud enough for one or two passersby to turn their heads in her direction. He quickened his pace.

  “I must have seen a legion’s worth of young men pay their offerings to your gods, all of them crying for their homelands.” She laughed again. “Your gods aren’t much use here, I’m afraid.”

  Her words had the bite of truth to them. He had made landfall in Britannia two days ago, one of a boatload of raw recruits sent to bolster the Second Augustan Legion before its westward march to face the Celts, and already he hated the place. It wore the stamp of the empire badly, like an ugly child playing in a beautiful woman’s clothes.

  The march from the coast had been a miserable affair shrouded in a freezing fog through which the bare trees, frozen marshlands and craven daylight that seemed to make up this wretched island, could just be discerned.

  The natives were little better. Like the land that supported them, they were drained of color and vivacity, their ghostly complexions criss-crossed with tattoos, like swollen veins. He imagined them eating its food and drinking its water, digging the very essence of the place out of the frozen soil and consuming it, contaminating themselves until even their blood ran gray.

  He began pining for the sweep and plunge of the hill country where he had spent his life working the baked russet soil in the shade of the ash trees. And by the time the gates of Londinium came into view, he had made up his mind ― he had to get out.

  The woman approached him, swinging her hips in a mockery of a flirtatious swagger. Her accent and dress were Celtic, although her clothes were the finest he had seen in months, and her Latin was flawless.

  “You’ve made up your mind to leave.”

  “I haven’t.”

  She began circling him closely, her bare shoulder rubbing his sleeve.

  “You have. And I can help you. But I need you to do something for me in return.”

  Her eyes were fierce and unblinking, the faint smile still in place beneath them. They had found whatever they had been looking for in him, he realized, and she was awaiting his response.

  “I don’t want your help,” he said, resuming his course. He would have to leave before the night watch began and they barred the gates.

  “Warm clothes, food and safe passage as far as Rome,” she called after him. “To the very gates of Caesar’s palace, if that’s what you want.”

  He walked on, slow and deliberate, the town holding its breath in the crisp air.

  “In exchange for what?” he asked, finally turning back.

  Her smile broadened. “I’ll show you.”

  ****

  The sun was failing and the snow reflected the purple taint of the sky as they approached the edge of the woods. Firelight burned strongly from within, painting blocks of shadow across the ground and a hum of voices could be heard, broken by an incongruous series of grunts and slaps. A cheer went up. Something moved against the flames.

  Following the woman, Rufinius emerged in a circular clearing lit by a trio of bonfires. A crowd of people stood in a loose ring around its fringes, watching two naked, glistening figures as they grappled in the centre.

  The woman did not wait for him, but found a space from which to observe the contest. A little awkwardly, he took up a position at her shoulder.

  The two fighters pulled apart and, in the second before they slammed back together, he was able to make out their features. One of them was a Celt, his face flowing with blood and tatto
os, his hair spiked in the style of a warrior.

  The other man was Gederus.

  Despite his brief spell in the settlement, he had already acquired the faintest trace of the awe in which the other legionaries held the man.

  “He’s afraid of nothing,” they all whispered. “Throttled a Vandal chieftain with his bare hands. Going to be a Centurion before another year’s out.”

  It was easy to believe. He was like a bear, standing a head taller than anyone else in the legion and even now had his opponent backing in unsteady circles around the clearing. A feint, a quick step, and he seized his prey, locking the man’s arms within his own. The crowd babbled excitedly, money and tokens changing hands.

  “Stop him.”

  The woman was at his ear, watching the Celt strain against Gederus as she might a stage play or a feat of acrobatics. He recognized it as the seasoned gaze of an expert critic.

  “Why? He’s winning a fair fight.”

  “Not the Roman. The Celt. He will become desperate, take up a rock and kill your legionary.”

  He tried to laugh, but her tone was businesslike.

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “I know battle. The nature of it drives me; its quality sustains me and ― there!” She thrust a pointing finger towards Gederus. “See what he wears!”

  True enough, he saw that Gederus was not entirely naked after all; something gold winked in the hollow between his pectoral muscles.