Sevenwaters [06] Flame of Sevenwaters

by Juliet Marillier

  Did I detect a coolness in her voice? Disappointment that I had chosen to stay away so long, through all the years of my growing up? Or was she merely tired and disturbed by everything that had happened here lately? I felt a gap between us, a space that had not been there with Father, who had needed no words to convey how much he’d missed me.

  Once inside the keep, I was whisked away upstairs before I could think about the last time I had been in this house. It came to me that my weariness and my mother’s efficiency might result in one very important thing being forgotten.

  “I haven’t met Finbar yet,” I said, hesitating outside the door to my old chamber, the one I had shared with Sibeal and Eilis.

  “I’ll send him up with your maid,” Mother said. “He’s a quiet child. Much like Sibeal was at that age. You look almost asleep, Maeve. I’m sad that you can’t join us for supper, but I don’t expect that of you. Most of our visitors are leaving in the morning. We’ll have a good talk then.”

  “Mother,” I said very quietly.

  “What is it, my dear?”

  “Never mind,” I said, finding the mountain I had to climb too steep for now. Explaining what I could do, what I couldn’t do, why I was uncomfortable in company, why I might be an embarrassment to them at a time when things were already difficult, my intention of heading back to Harrowfield as soon as I possibly could…“We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  Comforts were provided with remarkable speed: our bags brought in, a tub of warm water for bathing—that was utter bliss after the long ride—and then a very good meal on a tray, fetched by Rhian only after she, too, had made use of the bathwater, at my invitation. The opportunity seemed too good to waste. When we were halfway through eating there was a tentative tap on the door.

  Rhian opened it to reveal two figures outside: my brother, all big eyes and dark unruly hair, and the druid who had been at his side during the ritual.

  “I hope we’re not disturbing you,” this man said. He had a voice like honey and shadow, a voice surely made for the telling of stories. “Lady Aisling said you wanted to see Finbar. I am his tutor, Luachan.”

  There was a brief silence. Rhian appeared dumbstruck, and I understood why. Not only did Luachan have the softest, most melodious voice I’d ever heard, he also strongly resembled the handsome hero from some old wonder tale. His features were harmonious in every particular, his eyes a liquid blue, his hair falling in wavy locks the hue of oak bark, with a narrow plait here and there in the manner of the brotherhood. As Rhian and I stared, his grave demeanor was broken by a decidedly undruidic smile. “We thought we should wait until they took away the bathwater,” he said.

  An answering smile curved my lips despite my better judgment. If that was not an attempt to flirt, I did not know what it was. I had little experience with druids, but I was quite certain women did not entertain them in their private quarters. Especially this manner of druid. “Thank you,” I said. “It must be close to Finbar’s bedtime. Perhaps you could come back for him in a little while.”

  Luachan inclined his head courteously, then retreated. Finbar hesitated in the doorway as if not quite sure whether to come in. He did not look the kind of child one could sweep up into a hug. Besides, he did not know me, and my hands belonged in the kind of story misguided folk sometimes told to warn children of dangers. Don’t go into the woodland after dark, or the girl with claws for hands will get you.

  “Come on in, then,” Rhian said, taking the initiative. “Have you had supper? We’re still eating ours.”

  My brother advanced to the middle of the chamber. He stood there watching, his expression thoughtful, as we finished our food. He seemed especially fascinated by the way Rhian passed me the meat and bread piece by piece so I could feed myself, and the way I waited until the soup had cooled, then lifted the bowl between my wrists and drank directly from it. I wondered what question he would ask, but when he finally spoke he surprised me.

  “May I look at your hands, Maeve?”

  That was a little like a fist in the gut. Still, it was better than the face turned away, the avoidance of what was glaringly obvious. I held out my deformed hands for his inspection. To my surprise he took them in his small ones, turning them over, examining them carefully.

  “Father told me what happened to you,” he said. His voice was a child’s in timbre, but its tone was as solemn as any druid’s. “Can’t you bend your fingers at all?”

  “Muirrin made me do a lot of exercises after it happened,” I told him, thinking a serious question deserved a proper answer. “I believe she and Aunt Liadan were hoping I would be able to use my fingers a bit, but they stiffened up. They’ll always be like this now. I have my own ways of doing things.”

  “What sort of ways?”

  “Well, if Rhian wasn’t here to help me eat, I would use my toes to pick up the pieces of bread. But that is not something I can do in the dining hall.” I gave him a smile.

  “Can you really eat with your toes? Show me.” Now he sounded more like a seven-year-old boy and less like a wise old sage.

  I slipped off my shoes, dropped a crust of bread on the floor and demonstrated, hoping very much that nobody came in the door. “It’s not very dignified,” I said as I brought my foot up to my mouth. “And the food has to be in small pieces. Now you try.”

  The ensuing lesson had Finbar, Rhian and me in fits of laughter. I liked to hear my brother laugh. Seven seemed rather young to have a tutor.

  “How long has Luachan been here, Finbar?” I asked.

  “He came when Eilis went away. Eilis used to teach me. Reading and writing, and other things, too.” His eyes were bright now. They were of an unusually light blue-gray, like shadows on ice or water under an early-morning sky. “She taught me to go over jumps on my pony. I like riding. Luachan takes me every day.”

  “Did you see the horse we brought from Britain? He’s a beautiful yearling called Swift. We could go and visit him in the stables tomorrow.” A pause. “If Luachan approves, of course.”

  Finbar nodded. He was looking at my face now, where the burn scar marked my temple. “You were trying to save your dog when the flames came. I saw you in the fire.”

  The hairs on my neck stood up. “It happened long ago, Finbar. Before you were born.”

  “I saw you reaching out for him. I heard you calling: Bounder! Bounder, come! But he didn’t come, and you put your hands on something hot, and then you fell down. There was fire all around.” He was staring straight at me, but what he was seeing, I thought, was Maeve in the fire, little Maeve facing terror and pain like nothing she could ever have dreamed of. “You nearly died,” he said. “Father said you must have had a very strong will to live, or he’d have lost you that night.”

  I wondered that the story had been shared so openly with him. And I thought about those eyes, which were just like my sister Sibeal’s. Seer’s eyes. In our family, eyes of that color marked a child out as open to the Sight, both curse and blessing. I found myself wishing that Finbar had gray eyes like Father’s, or green ones like mine. “I suppose that must be true,” I told him, remembering a tale of a young woman whose features were so warty and deformed she resembled a toad, and her long quest to find one particular herb whose application could render her face beautiful. I could not remember ever believing this was true or in any way possible; not even when I was first injured, and desperately praying that I might some day be restored to what I had been. Neither herbs nor potions nor magic spells would take away the scar on my face or make my fingers bend and move like other people’s. I had long ago accepted my situation and moved on. If anyone wanted an example of a strong will to live, mine was a good one.

  “Bad things happen sometimes,” I went on, thinking that I would make time for my brother, tutor or no tutor, and do with him some of the things my sisters and I had enjoyed doing back in the time before the fire. It sounded as if Eilis had made a start with her ponies and jumps, but Eilis was gone. “They happen even to people who hav
e been good and sensible all their lives. Even to little children sometimes. I don’t know if it’s the will of the gods, or the mistakes of men and women, or simply fate. If it happens to you, you have to go on as bravely as you can and make the best of what you have.” I had not lived in the household of Aunt Liadan and Uncle Bran all those years for nothing. My uncle, in particular, had good cause to embrace that wisdom.

  “If there was something bad and you could change it,” Finbar ventured, his voice soft in the candlelit chamber, “would you?”

  This was not the simple question it seemed; there was a shadow in those big eyes, a darkness that sat ill on a child’s face.

  “Some things can’t be changed,” I said, glancing at my hands, “and it’s a waste of time to dream of it. But if I knew I could undo something bad that had happened, if I knew I could make a difference, I would try.” I hesitated. “But it would depend,” I said. “There can be a price, and sometimes the price is too high.”

  I wondered whether Finbar knew the whole story of his own past, how Mac Dara had stolen him as an infant and spirited him away to the Otherworld, leaving a sticks-and-stones baby in his place; how Clodagh and Cathal had eventually outwitted the prince of the Otherworld and escaped with Finbar safe and well. That had happened only after Cathal had offered himself in Finbar’s place; and Cathal had emerged safely only after an act of extreme bravery by Clodagh. As for a price, I thought perhaps the price of Cathal’s freedom had not yet been fully paid. If Mac Dara was still making mischief all over the region and setting chieftain against chieftain, as my father’s letter had indicated, clearly the account was as yet unsettled.

  “If people don’t pay the price,” Finbar said gravely, “the bad things keep happening.” His small features looked weary, the pale skin touched with gray.

  The tutor would be back soon. I would not send my brother off to bed on such a grim note. It seemed he knew about the Disappearance and had been listening to the tales of bodies found under gruesome circumstances. A child as sensitive as this would surely have seen the effect of that on our mother and father, and on all the household.

  “Our family has survived a long time,” I told him. “We’ve weathered battles and transformations, enchantments and floods and fires.” I kept my tone calm. “We’ve endured being sent away, and we’ve coped with evildoers in our midst. If I were telling a story of Sevenwaters—and it would be a grand epic told over all the nights of a long winter—I would surely end it with a triumph. A happy ending, all well, puzzles solved, enemies defeated, the future stretching ahead bright and true. With new challenges and new adventures, certainly, because that’s the way thing always are. But overall it would be a very satisfying story, one to give the listener heart.” How much of that was he likely to understand? I had been speaking as much to myself as to Finbar. Tomorrow I had my own demons to face.

  Rhian had been stacking the supper dishes on the tray, wiping down the small table, getting on with the unpacking. Now she straightened, hands on hips and a smile on her face. “I hope you’ll tell that tale sometime, my lady. I’d surely love to hear it.”

  “We all have our own parts of it, like threads in a tapestry,” I said. Finbar was standing close to me; I could have put my arm around his shoulders, and almost did so, since he had shown that my deformity did not disgust him. But I held back. With a wary horse I always took things slowly, one tiny step at a time. This felt very much the same. “When all those threads come together in the hands of a skilled weaver, that’s when the fabric gains its true strength.”

  “And that’s when you can see the pattern,” said Rhian. A ghost of a smile appeared on Finbar’s face.

  There was a tap at the door. Luachan had come to collect his charge. As Rhian went to let him in, I said, “Good night, Finbar. I’m very happy that you came to see me. It feels good to have a brother.”

  “Good night, Maeve. I’m happy you came home.”

  Someone had taught him good manners. I wondered whether that person had been Eilis, whom I remembered as a small whirlwind, far more interested in riding the tallest and most challenging horse she could find than in conversational niceties.

  Luachan stood in the doorway. The light from our candles fell across his chiseled features and illuminated his startling blue eyes. “I hope I am not come too early, my lady,” he said, demonstrating his own good manners.

  “Not at all. In my turn, I hope Finbar will have time to visit the stables tomorrow and see the horse we brought across from Britain. If he is not too busy with lessons, that is.” The more I thought about it, the more ridiculous it seemed that such a small boy should be subject to a formal education. Finbar should be outside playing. He should be riding his pony over the jumps, if that was what he enjoyed doing. He was far too somber for a child of his age.

  “Of course,” Luachan said with a devastating smile. “We’re at your command, Lady Maeve.” And with that the two of them were gone, leaving Rhian and me staring after them.

  “I’m completely revising my idea of a druid,” my handmaid observed a little later, when the door was shut and she was unfastening the hooks at the back of my gown. “Did you see the way he looked at us?”

  I made no reply. What had surprised me most about Luachan had not been his stunning appearance, his mellow voice or his mischievous smile, but the fact that he had met my gaze without a trace of either pity or disgust. He had looked at me as if I were a normal woman.

  CHAPTER 3

  I rose very early. Rhian was stifling yawns as she helped me dress. I suggested she go back to bed until it was a reasonable hour to fetch our breakfast. Then I made my way downstairs.

  I should have undertaken my mission by twilight, perhaps; recaptured more closely the way things were on that long-ago night of Samhain. Doors standing open, for spirits roamed abroad as the year made its turning to the dark. Empty chairs at the table, an invitation for lost loved ones to return and sit awhile amongst the living. A great bonfire blazing in the space between keep and stables. Uncle Conor speaking words of power into the chill air, then lighting a torch and passing it to my cousin Fainne, who walked about the house rekindling each hearth fire in turn. Later that night, with the household abed, I’d woken suddenly to hear screaming. Beyond the little round window of my chamber was a tapestry of flame and shadow. At ten, I was not allowed to have Bounder in my room at night, though I had pleaded his case with all the eloquence a child could summon. That Samhain night I’d known my dog was with our druid guests, who had softer hearts than my mother’s. The druids had not been accommodated in the keep, for to be thus enclosed unsettled them. They were sleeping in the annex across the stable yard. When I’d slipped downstairs and out the kitchen door, quiet as a little ghost, it had been to see the annex all afire…

  I had been brave then; I had acted without a moment’s hesitation. Now I was not so brave. I had waited until it was almost daylight to do what I must do. In the dark, the place would be too much the same. It would be all too easy to remember the smoky air catching in my chest and the hungry roar of the flames.

  I must retrace my footsteps as closely as I could. On the night of the fire I had not gone out the front door. Just as well, since there was no way I could open it now, with its big iron bolt. I slipped into the kitchen, which was full of the comforting smell of baking bread. Nuala was taking a batch of loaves out of the oven, her hair tied back in a scarf, her cheeks red. Two young assistants were preparing some kind of mushroom dish, their knives flashing with precision. Both stopped when I came in, staring at me round-eyed. Nuala straightened. I saw the flicker in her expression. Doran would have told her what to expect. They’d both been here a long time; she would remember the child I had been.

  “Welcome home, Maeve! I should say, my lady. It is good to see you again.”

  “And you, Nuala.” Perhaps I sounded a little too crisp, but I could not help it.

  “Girls, back to work!” Nuala snapped, and they obeyed, not without a few side
ways glances in my direction. “You’re up early, my lady. Hungry after yesterday’s journey?”

  “Rhian—my maidservant—will come down later and fetch some food for the two of us,” I said. “The bread smells wonderful. I want to go outside. Could you open that door for me, please?” A pox on the kitchen girls; they would simply have to get used to me. I gestured toward the door that led directly out to the stable yard and saw Nuala’s eyes widen as I lifted my disfigured hand.

  “Oh, let me—” She was quick to help, moving across the kitchen, holding the door open for me. “It’s cold out there,” she said. “Won’t you need a cloak?”

  “I won’t be long.” I turned my back and strode off across the yard. I had come out without cloak or veil, my scars on full display. That had seemed a necessary part of my personal rite.

  No bonfire now; only the first hint of dawn, rose-gold on the stone walls of the keep, the wattle-and-thatch outbuildings, the woven fences of sheepfold, byre and chicken coop. Shadows clung to the corners and lay across the ground where the feet of man, woman and child had stepped that long-ago night around the ritual bonfire. And farther out, beyond fence and wall, lay the forest, still sleeping under the violet-gray blanket of between-time. Somewhere in the trees a bird called a greeting to a morning not yet arrived.

  If it were Samhain now, the keep would be in darkness still. But I had returned to Sevenwaters in a brighter season, with the oaks in their summer finery and the meadows dotted with wildflowers. That did little to quiet the child within. As I walked across the yard she was whimpering in fear. Hush, I willed her. It is over. It was long ago. And I thought of Finbar’s words from last night: I saw you. You were trying to save your dog. I saw you in the fire. A shiver ran through me. Was my brother’s every day beset by such cruel visions? Was that what set the shadow in his remarkable eyes?