At the last Vesilly reaches down. Rips at my trouser leg and pulls away my last hope: my flint-blade. He grunts a word. It is foreign to my ears. But he sounds glad. I know that much as he throws me through the doorway.
For a moment I am sure I will die. Fall into darkness: onto spikes, or through a cavern so deep I will be old before I hit the bottom. But ground – stone – greets me almost at once. My arms take the brunt of the contact. The door clanks shut. Footsteps pass away, and I lie there. Still. My cheek on damp rock, my stomach sick with shame.
This must be how the fox feels when the chase is done.
My eyes roll in the gloom. I suck in air. I am not alone in here.
*
She is a young girl. Curled on her side. Her eyes are open. But their light is long gone. Dead.
It is too much. A sound like a scream drowned of air issues from my mouth. I bite into my bottom lip. Draw through. Grateful for the pain and the bittersweet tang of blood because they are things I know, things I knew before this dungeon and this darkness with a dead girl whose eyes never closed.
For how long I lie there. Balled up and bloody lipped. Breathing air that is rank like a stagnant pond. Every now and then, cries spill out from far away. Distant cheers from another world. How dare she! She will have her due!
Let us begin!
Eventually, when there is nothing else, I force myself to crawl over the dark gap to the girl. It is not Sara. I knew that at once. This girl has red hair. Her eyes are a fine blue, a clear river. She is a little older than Sara. Was.
I shudder. There are marks upon her neck. Twisted scars. Burns. Her wrists are manacled. At some point, before the end, she clawed at the stone.
My hand shakes. I manage to close her eyelids. The second time I have done this today: let the dead sleep. This time is worse even than Harvole in the weeping wood. He was an old man. She is just a child. Was.
The pit of my stomach empties. I wretch. Nothing comes out me. Nothing is left.
Cries rumble from the banquet above. They do not sound human anymore. Who are these men? What are they? How can they do such things? Why–?
Fingers scratch on the stone floor.
15.
Tis not the girl, though that is my first unhinged thought. That my touch of her cold eyelids has somehow brought her back from the dead, reanimated by whatever dark and ancient sorcery I can sense, I breathe, in the buried airs down here. No. The truth is perhaps worse. The scratching comes from across the dark space, from another in here with me.
My eyes shift to the gloom. A figure hunched against the far wall. Are they staring back? It feels so, but it is impossible to tell given the gloom and the shadows of their hood. Only a few things can I discern. A few wispy grey hairs fall from their cloak like gossamer. They are old. And thin: terribly so. A hand, bone under papery skin, sticks out from a sleeve. It is still. Crookedly lain on the wet black stone.
A barbed fear crosses my mind: This is a shadow…
Then the hand twitches again.
“I am not afraid of you!” I half-shout. It is the very opposite of truth.
The frail hand closes into a fist. It shakes, as though its owner has been overcome with anger, or something other force. A voice in the darkness: “You need not be.”
It should not be possible that four words lay one low like a great wind upon earth. But these do. They have a power beyond comprehension. Their wind rushes over and through me, and I am no longer entirely in the dungeon. No longer entirely in the black castle that exists, unseen, beside a lake in the northern country, so far from anywhere I have ever been. No longer entirely alone. The wind carries me back in time. Close to the youngest version of myself. Before a shadow fell and the world turned.
In the way of that child I begin to crawl.
The chain-link drags between my wrists. My passage is slow. Dream-like. I might be crawling through water. Half of me expects to wake. Find myself lying cold upon the floor, dreaming a dream I have had so many times it is a wrinkled part of my soul.
But the other half is lucid. Hearing every drip of water that falls to burst upon the stone. Seeing every stray of light that has somehow found its way to these depths, to catch and split upon on a sharp edge of wall. It is this half of me that holds onto the unearthly wind and when I reach the hunched figure, reaches out a tentative hand. Their flesh is real. Parchment-thin and cold to touch but real. I fear their fingers may snap, so frail are they and so desperate am I to clasp them.
They do not move. Then the voice whispers, “Child,” and a tear slips from my left eye. By some miracle I hold back the flood.
They let back their hood. Were I not so certain from the soft voice and the feel in my blood, I would not tell it was she. For all I remember, is the youth of her face. Her flushed skin. Her bright black hair. They are all gone. Sapped from her being. Life – time – has worked on her cruelly like fire on bark. Her skin is gaunt. Almost translucent. Her lips cracked raw. Even her eyes, those windows which people say never change, are different. Brewed darker and dimmer, their hazel light faded into a wood at dusk.
Seeing her changed nearly breaks my spirit – once and for all. Shatters me in a hundred pieces on this stone floor. Only one thing saves me: that she is here. She is alive.
“Mother,” I whisper.
*
For a time – I have no idea how long – we look upon one another. If someone were to come upon us, I imagine they would think us a pair of floating spirits, not quite of our bodies, held together by some force unseen.
Finally her eyes drift to the corridor beyond the grilled door and back to mine. “How is it, you are here?”
“How is it you are?” I gasp. “That day…I saw him cut you down!”
She swallows. Lifts her gaze. I see them again: her eyes that used to play-pretend with me when I feigned sleep from my bed in the corner of our home in the deep of the greenwood. I press her hand.
“Have you been here ever since?”
She sighs. Speaking tires her. “I believe so. It is hard to remember.”
I hate the fogginess in her way. Her mind. In my own, I cannot right that this is the same woman who reared me. But what must it be like? Twelve years. Locked in a place like this. Would it not destroy a soul as much as a body? A flicker of rage lights in my veins.
With effort she reaches up with a palm to touch the cheek of my face. My rage dissipates. Replaced by feelings that are just as strong but the opposite of fury.
“So many times I imagined you. What you may be doing. What you might look like. But to see you now, it is a blessing. You are so grown. A young woman. My daughter, my briar: Robyne of Locksley.”
“Robyne of Locksley?” The name sounds strange yet vaguely familiar, like an old song that returns in the corners of a dream.
Her eyes fold at the edges. “You do not remember. Of course not. Twas my own mother’s name.”
“But you called me Brya.”
She sighs deeply. “When we fled. Those months hiding in thickets in the forest. Deepest briar to sleep in at night. I was so exhausted. Scared that…but you would look at me. A babe. You would smile. And it was you, really, that saved me then. That protected me and kept me going. My briar.”
“Locksley?” It is all I can manage through a knot that is blocking up my throat.
“Where I first learnt of…” A sudden sharpness grips her, as if she had forgotten herself in the memory-world and the present rushes back to engulf her. “You must go, at once, Robyne! He cannot have you, my child.”
“The Burnt Man?”
She frowns. “You have seen him?”
I look over my shoulder to where the dead girl lies. “He took another girl.”
She closes her eyes. The movement exhausts her. That – or what I have told her saps her meagre strength. “Her name was Emily. She was so afraid. I couldn’t…He…”
Her voice trails off.
“I lied to you when you were little, Robyne.”
“It does.” She breathes in, seeking resolve. “I was trying to protect you. Always. But some things…cannot be run from.”
She pushes a hair from her dark eyes. A tiny movement that steals me back on the wind to when she, when I, was so much younger. When I was not Brya of Gisbourne but Robyne of Locksley.
“Before you were born, before our life in the greenwood, I was servant to a man,” she says. “A powerful noble. He was a brilliant man. Unlike any I had ever known. He was curious about me. He did not treat me as though I were below him, though I was.
“I loved him. And he, I. I could not believe such a thing could happen to me.”
She stops, her chest heavy.
“He was an alchemist. A student, too, of the worlds unseen.”
I want to ask her what she means but her words come in a flow like rushing waters and I dare not stem it.
“He grew fascinated with my own abilities. He said I had a raw connection, a way with the Four, like he had never seen. I could help him. His learning, you see.”
I do not but I do not interrupt her. The memory, the telling of it, seems to have given her some colour. Her breathing is rapid, but her gaze is full.
“I was blind. My love for him, when what he craved was power of a singular kind. That which the Four leads onto. Beyond. The darkest door.”
“Mother. I do not understand.”
Only her words stir in me a vision: the shapes in the tapestry of our home and on the wall of the castle above. The Four: the lines of air, and pools of water, the roots of the earth, and the halo of fire. Those shapes, overlaid, which Harvole carved with a stick in the ground in the weeping wood.
Beyond.
She leans into me – falls almost. “What these men seek is control, Robyne. Over the Four: earth and air, water and fire. So they may seize the anima and have their mastery over all that is living. Even death itself.”
She stares at me: a pale woman, wild as the wolf. I could not imagine it moments ago, but she frightens me terribly.
“So I took you from him.”
“Why would he want me?”
“Because you are his blood also.”
Her words settle like needles on my flesh. Dazed, disbelieving, I wish to tear at them. “No.”
“It is true.”
“You said my father was a soldier. You said…”
“I lied. When I knew you were growing inside me, I fled. Before he could discover. Before he could try to hurt you. To use you for his purpose.”
The wrinkles round her eyes crush into a thousand spider’s webs. I am haunted by what she has said.
“Yet he has you now,” she says, sinking. “He will take from you as well, so that he may open the door.”
“What door, mother?”
But there is rustling at our backs, a metallic ring. A face presses to the grilled bars of the cell. I am surprised to see him. But of course I should not be.
**
“Brya?” His voice is taut with amazement – and fear. “What in heaven’s name are you doing here?”
“Adam!”
His eyes shift to my mother. “You should get away from that crone!”
Part of me wants to run over and slap his pretty face. But there are too many things clouding my head. Like: can I trust him? When his father put me here, and my mother, too. And the girl: Emily. The one who perished in this dank pit. A shudder passes through me at the men who did this, and at the thought that I have little choice but to trust him for now.
“Can you unlock the door?”
Adam looks over his shoulder. He seems to be alone. “I’ll try.”
Still he hesitates.
“What is it?”
“Did they hurt you, Brya?”
I shake my head, seeing his concern. “Go!”
Adam disappears from the grill. My mother is watching me. Her eyes betray a fragile kind of hope. I drag her to her feet. How long since she has stood? She sways. Together, like two ancient creatures, we cross the cell. Her manacles grind over the stone. I wonder that the men will hear us. More footsteps. We turn to statues in the gloom. My mind readies for Vesilly’s misted face, for one of those rotten chants. But it is not he. Adam’s green eyes fill the gap.
“There is not much time!” A key turns in the lock; the bolt falls. “You must go at once, Brya! This is not safe for you. But she must stay.”
“What of her?” I growl, pointing back at Emily’s body.
Adam peers into the gloom. He flinches. Casts his eyes down. Is it shame? I cannot tell. I push past him. Lead my mother as fast as we can down the corridor and up into the curl of the stairwell. Adam does not try to stand in our way. He tracks after us, a nervous sprite.
“Do you have a key for these locks?” I ask, as they drag at both our wrists and at mother’s ankles.
“No, old Fayter carries them on his person, and he is in the kitchens.”
Fayter, the low man, I suppose. He is not the one I am worried about. Mother’s breathing grows taut as we climb. She leans against me even more. But she is not heavy. It is horrible how little there is of her.
The hallway bears light. The tongue of candle-flame sticks out from the chamber ahead. After the cries of before it is all too silent. As we progress, I keep to the far wall. Shrouded in the shadows. The manacles grind so I lift them from the stone, their heft pulling on my arm. The great door to the castle is but fifty steps ahead. Beyond that: the fetid moat and the shallow bridge across the lake and then the weeping wood and further, still…a vision takes form before my eyes, so rich and real that I can taste it.
Escape. Freedom.
Yet I hear something else. The silence is not total. My throat begins to itch.
We are near the tongue of firelight that is spilling from the chamber. Adam, moving past us, whispers for us to go on, we must hurry! But I cannot stop myself. I turn. So does my mother. We each look upon the spectacle of the great hall. Bound together by our blood but also by the horror in our gaze.
And my blood chills like deep water beyond the reach of any light.
16.
Mortain looms over a raised slab. On it is a girl with long brown hair. She is turned away from where I stand. Yet in my mind I see her face vividly. As I did that day she ran into me in the marketplace. Sara. She is alive. Her cries are muffled. Her slender back trembles. She is manacled at both ankles and one wrist. For some reason they have left her other arm free.
With it, she tries to fend off the nobleman as his arms come upon her. He pins the free arm with ease. His chin lifts. Not towards the doorway or towards us – but to the men who watch with baited breath from their ring around the banquet table.
Mortain issues a deep, guttural chant:
iggray...eeyol…
fugrat…rhymm…
iggray…eeyol…
fugrat…rhymm…
Out of the corner of my eye: my mother’s lips are moving. She is making the same sounds as Mortain. Entranced. I reach back to her. Tug at her wrist, pleading for her to see me. But she looks on and then my eyes, too, are drawn back to the great hall.
From the four orbs high on the walls strings of light and dust start to take form. They glow like great, thick spider’s webs. Stringing from the glistening glass downwards to the man who is chanting, who is stood over the girl, gripping her wrist. Stealing from her something that I cannot name yet I can feel. It is condensing the air like the charge before a lightning storm that stands the hairs on your neck all on end.
Sara’s body suddenly goes rigid. A sharp tremor passes over Mortain’s face, which is at once eerily calm and fiercely focused. His eyes close. His lips continue to move: iggray...eeyol…
He seems to grow. His body. Stretches.
The tremor, I see now, with a sinking kind of terror, is a flame. It is licking as a tongue over his flesh. Turning it: from pale white to da
rk brown and thence to the red of broiling skin. And in that moment I see Him as he was that day in the greenwood: coming for her, cutting her down. The discovery reducing me to a child-like state: a shivering inability to move or even to think – to only watch as Mortain becomes the Burnt Man. The four thick strings of light attaching to him, to each of his limbs, as he chants and writhes, drawing on the gossamer: the anima, I think suddenly, without knowing the true meaning or the depth of my own thought.
Were I even able to process such an unearthly sight, there is no time to try. Sara’s hair starts to burn, her screams more frantic, and I am snapped from the hideous reverie. I stumble to seize the bow and arrow from the bench, ignoring Adam’s appeal for us to flee. I kneel at the threshold, setting an arrow. Staring at the Burnt Man. It is like so many of my fever dreams relived. He is returned to me. Our visitor. Mother – who is still rapt, still mumbling those words as if in harmony with Him – says he is my blood, and I am his. But it matters not. All that does is Sara’s agony and his drawing from it: his lips parted in a kind of prayer, godless and craven, as though the mastery itself is what consumes him.
My rage and fear are such that I cannot keep my bow arm still. At the last my mother seems to take note of what I am doing. But her eyes are dim. Glazed.
“He binds the anima,” she says, a faint shake of her head. “It is gone too far.”
So be it.
From the stairwell, out of the corner of my eye, the low man – Fayter – appears. Surrounded by more of the swollen cats with their orange fur. I spin the arrow and with scarce a thought of what my action will achieve release it. The flight is a darting bird down the corridor. The beak strikes him in the neck. The cats issue a feral shriek and launch their bodies in our direction.
On some level, it hits me that I have just killed a man. I have ended a life – just like that. But the awful weight of this does not yet strike. It is held at bay by the fraught madness of now: Sara’s cries and Mortain’s distending body, his face catching with a fierce crimson light.
He is no longer solely a man. He has the shape of one, if elongated; he has arms and legs, a face. Yet he is made of strange other properties. In places his skin runs. The fire over his flesh is flickering purple and greenish at the edges. His fingers, lifted skyward, have a liquid quality. It makes my eyes water and blur and yet I cannot look away – as if I, too, am bound by the white-silvery cords flowing into Him from the orbs high above the chamber.
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