“I’ll catch a tasty treat for your supper this evening, little one,” Eoin said to Jewel, in an effort to coax her out of her gloom, but she answered not a word. The girl spoke rarely, and her eyes, her blue eyes like two amethysts in caskets lidded with lapis lazuli, gazed out with a dreary and haunted look.
It was agonizing to dwell on the recent past, yet somehow she could not prevent herself from doing so. She had lost nearly everything she loved, everything that was familiar to her: family, home, pets, and possessions. Seeking for some comfort, Jewel glanced over at Eoin, her step-uncle and protector, for whom she felt an earnest fondness, knowing nothing of his role in her downfall.
As they plodded onward, the marshman was himself buried deep in thought, endlessly rebuking himself for the part he had played in Jewel’s suffering. Had Eoin never revealed Jarred’s identity to King Maolmórdha’s minions, the king would not have learned that Jewel’s father was descended from the notorious Sorcerer of Strang. Then the royal cavalry would not have come thundering along the road to the Great Marsh of Slievmordhu. Their pursuit would not have triggered Lilith’s madness, and she would not have run to the cliff-top in a blind panic. Jarred would not have died trying to save his wife, and twelve-year-old Jewel would not have been forced to flee from her home.
Eoin blamed himself for all these tragedies. None of this would have happened if he, displaying a pettiness unworthy of a truly upright man, had not informed against his rival. Driven by his own vain jealousy, he had brought this fate of loss and exile upon the child he doted on, daughter of the woman he adored—and now he must do what he could to make reparation, although he ached, as if the fibers of his sinews had been shredded.
The marshman unhitched the slingshot from his belt and couched a stone in the strap. He was ready when, with the whirring of a hundred rapid spinning wheels, a brace of grouse flew up from the ferns beneath their feet. After whirling the weapon around his head, he let fly. He was lucky; a plump bird fell, wounded. Eoin wrung the bird’s neck, plucked it, and roasted it over a campfire on the banks of a narrow stream. Succulent juices ran from the meat, but as enticing as the meal appeared, it tasted no better than sand in the melancholy mouths of the diners.
As if to punish himself, Eoin brought to mind the uncanny funeral he had lately witnessed in the city of Cathair Rua: a mock, staged affair, conducted by eldritch wights, the coffin containing a corpse whose face was the exact image of his own. Eoin had comprehended at once that he had viewed a prophecy of his own death; within a twelve-month he would perish. Somehow, as he brooded by the campfire, the prospect lent him some relief. If only he could bring Jewel to some safe haven before his final hour, he would be quite glad to lie down, relinquish his gut-wrenching remorse, and find peace.
After the joyless meal was over, Eoin went down to the stream to refill the water flasks.
As he knelt by the water, the flesh clenched on the nape of his neck and unaccountable fear shivered through him. A harsh voice had called from the brakes of fern, a voice like a cry from the long, hoarse throat of some wild bird.
Raising his head apprehensively, he saw a strange entity watching him from the other side of the stream. It was a stunted, man-like thing, strongly built and doughty. Its umber tunic and leggings were so ragged they appeared to be fashioned from withered bracken, and its frizzled hair was as russet as the sap-starved leaves of Autumn. Its eyes were bulbous, outlandishly huge, and they rolled beneath its shaggy red brows like the eyes of a wrathful bull.
“How dare ye come here slaughterin’, ye miscreant?” it growled. “The wild creatures in this place are under my guardianship. If nuts and blackberries sustain me, that am their custodian, should they not be good enough for you? Step over to this bank, and I’ll show you the victuals I gather.”
Eoin guessed this was the Brown Man of the Muirs, a wight he vaguely recalled from old tales. As far as he could remember, the wight forbade hunting in its own domain. Horror engulfed Eoin, that he had offended an eldritch being, and for a moment he was daunted. Then it came to him that he was acting like a coward and, despising himself, he sprang up and set his foot on a tussock, preparing to jump across the stream. As he did so, he heard Jewel’s young voice from somewhere behind him, crying out pitifully, “Uncle Eoin, where are you?”
He wheeled about. The little girl was running toward him, her hair and gown streaming behind her on the wind.
“Go back! Go back!” Eoin warned, but when he turned back again the Brown Man had disappeared. “Did you see it?” Eoin asked, as Jewel rushed up beside him.
“See what?” demanded Jewel. She tossed back the dark tangle of her tresses and folded her arms across her chest.
“That was the Brown Man of the Muirs, if I’m not mistaken,” said Eoin, craning his neck to peer in amongst the crochet of fronds on the opposite bank. “He bade me cross the stream and join him, saying he would show me how to find nuts and berries. Come, let us ford the brook and seek him.”
“Are you mad?” shouted Jewel disbelievingly. “If ’twas indeed the Brown Man, then ’twas only the running water that saved you! If you had crossed over, the wight would have torn you apart and not even your druid-sained amulet would have protected you!”
Bewildered, the marshman shook his head.
“Come away,” said the little girl, her mournfulness now replaced by anger, “and hunt no more. Do you wish that I should lose you, too?”
Then, as suddenly as her mood had changed, it changed again. The light in her eyes dulled and her hands dropped listlessly by her sides.
Strung up on a gallows of jealousy, betrayal, and premonition, Eoin felt guilt tighten like a noose around his gullet. The child’s evident wretchedness pained him excruciatingly. It was he who was to blame for her bereavement and exile, no one else.
“No,” he mumbled. “Let us go on.”
Once, as evening deepened to night and they passed through a young oak wood, they spied a twinkling of lights through the trees and caught the babble of voices. Not wishing to be discovered by bandits, they crept forward silently. There in a clearing they beheld a scene of feasting and revelry set out on the greensward under the stars: a long table, garlanded with moon-roses, laden with dishes piled high with delectable fare. As the two mortals cautiously approached, musicians struck up a merry jig and the guests began footing it around the table.
Marvelous to look upon were these dancers and musicians, some as fair as flowers, elegant, silk-haired, clad in rainbows of finery. Others were foul nightmares, squat as toadstools, crooked and lopsided as trees rooted on a windswept sea-cliff, bloated as leeches, quick as rats, long-legged, gangling, and knock-kneed as newborn foals, grinning like pumpkin lanterns, hopping like frogs, graceful as cats, scowling like belligerent gargoyles.
Knowing full well that they looked upon a gathering of no mortal creatures, Jewel and Eoin scarcely dared breathe, lest they betray their presence. Eldritch wights could not bear to be spied upon, and might exact some terrible revenge for such a crime.
Slowly the intruders backed away, but an incautious step snapped a twig. In that instant the twinkling lights went out as if the eyeballs of the mortals had been gouged from their sockets. Simultaneously the strains of music were cut off in mid-bar, and the babble of voices stopped in mid-word. All was silence and darkness.
Fortunately, the stars let down enough filaments of light through the oak leaves for the wayfarers to relocate their forest trail. Soon they were on their way once more, putting as much distance as possible between themselves and that spooky place before weariness overcame them and they made camp for the night.
Eleven days after the wayfarers had fled the Great Marsh of Slievmordhu, they found themselves in open country that climbed to meet the rounded shoulders of the Border Hills. Eoin had cut a staff of blackthorn-wood for himself, and a shorter length for Jewel. Using these for support, they plodded up a gentle slope of turf that had been cropped short by deer and wild goats, a smooth greensward stre
wn with low boulders and occasional clumps of the weed crowthistle.
Glancing ahead, Jewel fancied they were ascending a stairway to the sky. Out of the northwest, low, livid rainclouds were moving swiftly eastward, heavy with rain. Where sunlight struck them, they boiled out into puffs of luminous dazzle, pristine pillows of steam. Farther east, they broke up into islands in a blue sea that faded from cobalt at the zenith, merging to a haze of softest gray at the horizon.
A drawn-out sighing greeted them as they reached the top of a ridge, the sound of cool breezes breathing through a copse of beeches that crowded close together. Magpie-larks swooped, uttering their rusty-gate-hinge calls. As the wayfarers walked over the spine of the ridge and down into the copse, the trees loomed taller, towering overhead. Their wide-reaching boughs nodded gently, whispering; their shade was cool and dappled, the ground patterned with tender green blades and butter-curls of leaves, gold and brown. A path of sorts went winding between the boles. Here they rested for a while, seated with their backs against corrugated bark.
“When we come down out of these hills,” said Eoin presently, “we shall leave Slievmordhu behind us. These are the borderlands. Narngalis lies ahead.”
Solemnly, Jewel nodded.
Throughout their journey together, Eoin had never seen her smile. This was not to be wondered at. There was no reason for either of them to be mirthful. Wretchedness and weariness weighed upon him. He wondered how much Jewel knew, or guessed, about the part he had played in the ruination of her family, of her life. As ever, his thoughts flickered miserably back over the recent series of events, precipitated by a single, spiteful act born of his vindictiveness. Privately—so as not to cause further distress to Jewel—he pined grievously for Lilith. He was consumed by an unassuageable longing to return to that pivotal moment in time when he had stepped into the palace, so that he might erase his errors and change everything.
Having swallowed a mouthful of water, he and Jewel got up and continued on their way.
The colors of the wayfarers’ raiment blended with those of the landscape. This was because they were covered in much of it. The marshman, gangling and long-jawed, was clad in the same gear he had been wearing throughout his helter-skelter ride from Cathair Rua. His soft leather leggings were travel-stained; his fine linen shirtsleeves had been rent, in places, by the protruding spurs of low vegetation through which he had pushed in haste. The gray stocking-cap he had purchased from the landlord of the “Ace and Cup” in Cathair Rua had fallen off long ago. The reddish knee-length tunic, now dirty brown, was coming unstitched at the seams. Its cheap woolen fabric was thin, and provided little warmth. When he woke from his brief slumbers, he was always shivering. His boots, however, were stout, and well endured the trials of swift passage across rough terrain.
The smudges on the face of the twelve-year-old girl walking at his side could not obscure her beauty. Her hair was as black and shiny as a handful of acacia seeds, and the dark locks clung together in a singular fashion, so that the tapered ends spiked forth like the new-budding tips of a fir tree. Narrow was her waist, no wider than the thigh of a grown man. Her skin was peaches-by-firelight; her mouth was the softly curved petal of a pink rose. She wore a linen kirtle beneath a woolen gown, and over her shoulders a traveling-cloak, lined with fur, clasped with a brooch of bronze. The matching traveling-hood hung behind her shoulders. Like her step-uncle, she had lost her other headgear; her scarf was dangling from a twig somewhere, having been swept from her scalp during that first frantic scramble away from the northern shores of the marsh. Her boots, like Eoin’s, were well made. In happier days he had purchased them for her, as a present, from the most reputable cobbler in Cathair Rua.
Trudging beside Jewel along the verdant vales and wooded slopes of the Border Hills, Eoin was glad of his gift to the child. It was his fault she had been hounded from her home in search of an uncertain future, his fault, indirectly, that she was orphaned. The irony was that of all things that lived in Tir, he cared most for her.
The two wayfarers met no human being in these high places, only the mortal creatures of the wilderness, such as birds, insects, reptiles, beasts of hoof and horn. Sometimes in the gloaming they spied more wights—whether seelie or unseelie they could not tell, but they kept their distance. If human beings had ever dwelled in the Border Hills, they were long gone.
These were lonely lands.
As they journeyed, Eoin never let down his guard. The fear of pursuit remained strong in him still, accompanied by the awareness of clandestine eldritch activity all around. Furthermore, he was heavily burdened with a sense of responsibility for his step-niece, a desire to protect her from all harm, both because he loved her and because while defending her he could deceive himself that he was relieving his guilt.
He was unable to bring himself to talk to his young companion about the terrible events that had befallen her, never tried to break her long silences. Above all, he could not bear to incur the child’s hostility by revealing the role he had played in her family’s tragic fate. Of course, she had been audience to her father’s harsh words to Eoin shortly before Jarred’s death, and she must have perceived there was more ill-feeling between them than usual, but she never confronted Eoin with demands to be told exactly what had happened. Perhaps she believed it was all too appalling to contemplate and was best left unvoiced. Perhaps her overwhelming grief clouded her reason. For Eoin’s part, his remorse and self-reproach prevented him from broaching the subject with her.
At nights he did not sleep, preferring to keep vigil. During the days he and Jewel would halt at noon, when he would fall into a dreamless slumber for a few hours. Relentlessly his body stayed taut as a spring, his muscles involuntarily twitching at random intervals, ever ready to react to the first hint of peril; and his sharp eyes flicked back and forth, noting the shape of every boulder, the motion of every bough and pool of shade. He watched, also, for suggestions of disturbance amongst the wild fauna of the hills, which might provide clues to impending danger.
Crickets whirred rhythmically in the seeding grasses of Autumn, counterpointed by the dark, oceanic soughing of the wind through drifts of living leaves. The wayfarers were passing through another scattered beech wood when two events occurred simultaneously. Although they scarcely engendered any sound, alarm screamed through the skull of Jewel’s guardian.
Not far off to the right, a flock of wood-pigeons fountained into the air, their wings flapping like a multitude of white hands waving farewell. And a vertical litheness detached itself from a tree-bole before gliding into a thicket.
Instantly, Eoin spun around. Jewel had been dawdling behind him. Now he discovered that she had dropped back several paces and was leaning over, intent on examining some weed or wildflower sprouting from the crevice of a mossy boulder.
“Hide!” Eoin hissed through his teeth, signaling urgently to reinforce his words. Surprise flared momentarily across the girl’s features; then she obeyed, dropping out of sight amid the lush foliage of a bank of foxgloves.
Where Eoin had stood, he stood no longer. He, too, had thrown himself to the ground, and now lay rigid. Between thin wands of tussock-grass he could see the figures of men who might well have been mistaken for part of the countryside, had they not been on the move. His first thought was that the king’s soldiery had discovered Jewel’s existence, had somehow tracked her down, and were quartering the hills in their search for her. Almost at once he realized the folly of such an assumption—the men he was watching were making their way on foot, not on horseback. Neither were they clad in the uniforms of the Royal Guard, but in motley garb, dun-hued, their visages largely obscured by leather helms. As well, they advanced with an easy stealth that could only be learned from practice in the wilderness, never by routine drill in the training-yards of a military barracks.
These men were bandits—or, worse, the warped mountain-swarmsmen known as Marauders.
Most likely Marauders, Eoin concluded to himself, using the shelter
of the Border Hills to conceal their passage toward Grïmnørsland and the coast. The men, spread across a wide front, were stepping noiselessly between the trees. Soon, one of their number appeared from behind a scabrous beech growing quite close to Eoin, and the marshman held his breath. Lie tranquil, Jewel. His lips formed the words without uttering them—yet he knew with certainty that the child would lie immobile, unflinching. She was not one to startle easily, and he had great store of respect for her common sense.
The walker went past without spying the refugees in their makeshift coverts.
The farther-off Marauders were no more than a shaking of leaves, a mellow crunch of dry seed-pods underfoot, an erect form ducking beneath a bough. Those passing closer to Eoin’s hiding-place resolved themselves into unsavory-looking fellows whose belts and baldrics sported a vast array of portable weaponry. Some carried bundles on their shoulders. They did not speak to one another, but now and then one would cup his hands around his jowls and make a call like an owl, a signal to his accomplices.
Foolish, thought Eoin. Owls are nocturnal. . . .
Eoin counted eighteen mountain-brigands. The wind began to rise as the last of them disappeared into the woods to the west and blended into the scenery. When the sounds of their excursion had died away, Eoin dared to draw a deep breath and raise his head.
As if struck in the face, he reeled.
He had been mistaken. Buffeted by a swirling tide of golden leaves, a nineteenth swarmsman was following in the wake of the rest. His footfalls as muted as a deer’s, the Marauder happened to be making straight for the weedy bank where the child lay concealed. At any moment, he must surely stumble over her.
Jewel, curled up in her bower of late-blooming foxgloves like some elfin princess in a castle of purple turrets, heard someone approaching. Judging by the tempo and style of the pace, she guessed it was not Eoin. Notions of incorporeal footsteps flitted through her consciousness, and in that moment she believed her mother’s madness had descended upon her.
The Well of Tears: Book Two of The Crowthistle Chronicles Page 2
