Silver Eve

by Sandra Waugh

  “Harker!” I stamped my foot.

  “You must pay me for your fortune, Healer.”

  “Please, I have no—”

  “I give away no news for free.” It was a loud, a bitter declaration. The old man choked a little upon saying it, and added, harsher, “I cannot be tempted. Never again.”

  I turned away, frustrated, but then spun back. “Seer that you are, you must know I have no coins. So you must content yourself with something else.”

  He waited. I said, “You have blisters on your hands. I can heal them.”

  Maybe he’d known I’d reach this stage of barter, but not this particular offer—there was an eager spark in his eyes. He dismissed it quickly, though, with a sharp little bark: “Do you think so?”

  “Hold them out,” I insisted.

  He did. I kneeled down at his feet and took up his hands. They were worn and spotted and gnarled, made horrible by red-rimmed blisters, and he shivered under the inspection. I had expected to smear some of the heliotrope, or mix a poultice from the goat’s milk and borage. I could shape an arch of the blackberry bushes and have the seer crawl beneath three times—such were medicines for skin boils. But what Harker suffered was nothing I could repair. This was pain that goaded and punished.

  I said to him, “These wounds are magic-made. You gave or held something that you should not.” Then I ducked a little so I could catch his eye and speak straight. “You were burned because of a mistake you made.”

  His returning stare was bleak. “How long have you suffered these?” I asked.

  “I am old. These are not.”

  I looked again at the blisters, wondering what ill he’d done to carry such a reminder. “Well, I’m sorry. I cannot heal such wounds.”

  He jerked his hands away with a sly little smile. “Are you sorry for me or for yourself?” And then he was chuckling at my frown. “You still want to know what I can tell you.”

  “Yes.” I tugged my satchel closer and dug in, pulling out the vial of heliotrope buds and offering it. “Here. You may have these. Roll one around in your mouth ’til it is fully dissolved before you swallow. One at a time only. ’Twill bring you a full night’s sleep at least. Make them last.”

  Harker took the vial. One of his blisters brushed my skin; it burned cold. He put the little jar into the folds of his robe—some pocket hidden within—and said, “You give the heliotrope; you give me your own escape. Why not the jar of minion? You are shrewd, Healer.”

  I pressed the satchel against my cloak. “The minion is too precious to trade.” I said it firmly, disconcerted that he knew I carried minion and that I wanted the heliotrope for my own end. He was the shrewd one.

  “True,” he was answering. “But that is not why. Still, a penny’s worth of sleep for a penny’s worth of fortune.” Harker pushed himself up from the stone; I saw how it hurt to use his hands. A constant suffering. “Stand away from me, Evie Carew. Step into the stream.”

  I knew what he meant. Running water held no intent, no spells good or bad. It was a fair place to wait, fair of him to ask. I stepped back into the cool shallows and felt the pebbled bed loosen around my toes and disperse. I held my breath, held in my eagerness for his words.

  Harker too stepped back. He lifted his face to catch the dying sun full on it, his scrawny little frame stiffening. And he waited. But he was not drawing his words from the sky, rather waiting for them to form within him and bubble up.

  And then he spoke, stilted, reading from a page that did not exist:

  Moonlight on water brings Nature’s daughter,

  Swift-bred terror and sorrow of slaughter.

  Silver and sickle, the healing hand,

  Find the shell’s song; bring rain upon land.

  I waited, then burst out: “That is no fortune. That is a verse of poem.”

  “Nonetheless it belongs to you.”

  “But it means nothing to me!” I came out of the water, shaking the wet from my sandals. “Can you not say that I will die here? That the marsh will swallow me—something that makes sense?”

  “Those would be the things that do not make sense, for that will not happen.”

  “Why not? Because you speak some fanciful words? Because I gave you my heliotrope? If this is not your home, then I will make it mine. I will stay here, grow old here. Tend the goats.” I’d made that up. I was disappointed he’d given me no clear fortune, annoyed that my own choices were so simply negated.

  But he laughed at me. “You will not, the one Healer, any more than you will take your own life with an herb. You toy with your little idea of death, thinking you are sad to be left alone. You blame your gift of healing for your hesitation, but that is not why you hold on to life. You do not see—”

  “Don’t say that! You know nothing of me!”

  “I will say it. It is you who know nothing, silly girl. This is not your time. You are needed.”

  “Needed?” How dare he talk of changed fate, so smugly dangled like bait! “How am I needed?”

  Harker walked back toward me and inspected me for a minute. “You are not shy like your cousin,” he said. “You are hardly timid. Yet you share some of her stubbornness, and maybe more. Not unlike the others.”

  “What others?”

  “Your cousin told you nothing of her journey!” The seer announced this with delight, but immediately contorted in agony. He swerved, swore, and spun around, crying to the space around us, “I do not have to tell! I do not have to tell!” And in the next breath he cringed, hissing to himself: “Your fault, so your duty to bear…” The protests grew to indistinct whines and faded. Then the seer shook himself, recovered, then looked at me coyly again. “She told you nothing, Healer, which makes you most ignorant. Unfortunate for one so curious.”

  I was curious, gruelingly so. But I changed tactics, refusing to ask anything more, since the more I questioned the more he evaded. After a moment he repeated, taunting: “Nature’s daughter, one of the four.”

  I bit my tongue, waited.

  He moved a little then, fixing me with his gaze. “Single daughters of twin mothers, born on the same day in the same hour. Alike and yet opposite.”

  Harker was speaking of Lark, of me, of our nearly sister connection. He said it like a chant:

  “Her hair runs brown like the falling leaf, and yours is the rippling moonlight on a lake. Her eyes are the hazel of a new acorn and yours are the blue of the sea. Her skin is touched by sun, yours is the pale of the full moon.” He shuffled a little more, circling slowly so that he was almost behind me. “She stays quiet like a fawn; you move easily in company. She wears her feelings; you suffocate yours. So different. And yet…” Harker lifted his scarred hand to point at my back. “What is alike between you? What do you share with your dearest Lark?”

  I knew, small as it was. “We share a birthmark.”

  The seer nodded. “Yes. A mark. Just there above the blade edge of your left shoulder.” He reached a finger to touch it; I shivered, jerked away, and turned on him—

  He pulled back, cowering and shouting, “I am sorry! I am sorry! I am sorry!”

  “You did nothing…” I protested, but stopped. Harker was not apologizing to me; he was looking up to the empty, intense blue.

  There was silence while he searched, waiting for some answer, and then suddenly he fell to the ground with a scream of anguish and began writhing in pain. He held his hands out in front of him; there was a shimmer of heat rising from his blisters. They were burning. I grabbed his wrists, dragged his racked body to the stream, and plunged his hands into the cold water. “Hold them there, it will help.” Running water could wash small magic away. But I doubted it could this.

  He lay there, hands in fists underwater, convulsing and sobbing into his shoulder, “I am sorry!” What he was sorry for I didn’t know, but I was sorry for him. He was too old yet too far from death to be enduring such agony.

  At length old Harker worked his way to his knees and drew his hands from the
water. They were raw but no longer on fire. Sober, quiet, and suddenly very sane, the seer murmured, “All want me to share what I know; all want me to help them face their fates—as if fates could not be changed in an instant! And yet…And yet no one cares for my fate. No one wishes to help me.”

  He raised his head, looked straight at me. “Except you, Eveline Carew. I did not foresee your kindness to me.” Then, sitting back a little and squaring his shoulders, the seer said, “You have earned this, young Healer. I tell you this freely, so listen well:

  “You see that a darkness is coming. I will not call it by name, but know that this darkness begins as a violence of Nature and becomes the violence of Man. It will consume us all if it cannot be stopped. But you, Evie Carew, are one who can help stop this darkness. You asked three questions before, so three things I will share. Not your questions, nor things that are in and of themselves your fate, but knowing these three things will help guide you:

  “You must find the shell amulet. And if you love your cousin you will not ask for any help.

  “Secondly, you believe you are hiding because you feel grief at a death, but that is not what you truly hide from. You must open your eyes.

  “And lastly, they will strike you where you are weak.”

  Harker cringed then, as if he knew what weakness was, as if he expected his hands to burst with new pain. But nothing happened, and so he straightened and made a funny little bow and began walking away.

  I followed. “Am I supposed to thank you for this? For leaving me with more questions?”

  “Yes.”

  “But that is no gift—”

  “I did not say I would give you a gift, I said you earned these.”

  “But then can I not barter for more earnings? Will you not say more?”

  “No.”

  And Harker brushed off his filthy robe and, avoiding the single path, turned to the wall of reeds.

  “Harker!”

  He ignored me. Yet I couldn’t let him leave; burden me with more questions. “Harker!”

  I ran to catch up but he turned on me fiercely, hissing, “They will strike you where you are weak! Where are you weak, young girl?” He grinned meanly, stuck his face too close. “Where. Are. You. WEAK?”

  I held my ground. The seer was mad, maybe, but not harmful.

  He answered for me. “Curious—too eager for knowledge, Healer! And longing for what was. Curiosity sways emotion, as does longing, Healer; they are needs. Be careful what you need!”

  The seer whirled then, spiraling back, railing to the marsh, “I have given her more than I dared! I will suffer. I will suffer.” He parted the brittle stems.

  “Milkweed, Harker,” I called out abruptly. “Break milkweed stems, smear them on your hands. The milk might ease a bit of your pain.”

  Harker paused and looked back. “That,” he said, eyeing me sadly, “I already know.” He turned around again and pushed in.

  His drab robe was quickly swallowed by the forest of brown. Then all that was left was the faint applauding of the reeds.

  THERE WAS NO sign of any threatening darkness on this little island. I sat in the middle of the green lawn looking at silly, fat clouds huffing across a lucid blue sky, listened to the brr and shrill of redwings as they conversed clinging to the velvet tips of cattails. It was sweetly pastoral: a bee drunkenly weaving through the clover, the kid bleating after his mother, the stream bubbling quick and clear and cold; none showed concern. Harker’s ominous foreboding had echoed mine—that something dark was coming to our little world—but it was not present here. Perhaps I’d lost myself at last.

  Except that Harker had said those words: You will find no peace here. Prophetic or mocking, they were more than a little thorn. And his cryptic verse, his challenge and warnings made everything unsettled and wanting. It burned me that he said I earned those things. He knew questions would bubble up in me, eat away at any peace. I should defy his words to prove him wrong; stay here in this spot until whoever owned this hut and these goats returned in a week, a fortnight, a lifetime.

  I lasted two days.

  Two days: milking the nanny goat, collecting berries and salad greens, gathering dead branches and fishing cinder stones for fires out of the stream. The hut had a cup and a plate and a broom for sweeping; I wove a basket from the willow to add as way of thanks. I cleaned my marsh-filthy clothes. I played with the kid, or rather, he ran from me as I chased him. And I slept under the stars, for it was so pretty, and too warm for the hut. Lark would have loved this solace.

  But while my hands were useful, my mind was fixed on the old seer. What had Harker meant by not letting Lark help me? What had he meant by find the shell? Why did he say to open my eyes? No chore, no sleep helped me escape his words or the want to understand his prophecies….I finally had to surrender in agreement with the seer, the sweetness of this place paling as I fretted: There was no peace here.

  Another battle raged inside as well: I already knew how to find answers to the seer’s offerings. I had the yew and minion still; they could be combined in a spell to create a powerful mind opener called the Insight. Except it was a dangerous crafting, and something for a magician, not a simple Healer.

  They were different, magic-makers and Healers. Healers were born with their gift, while a magician was someone who learned the craft. A Healer’s work was limited to the ways of Nature; the magician’s not. A magician was a conjurer, but, then, he did not have the Healer’s hands, the natural instinct for rescue, for assuaging pain. Either way, efforts done in ignorance made for danger.

  But, if a Healer chose to study the ways of magic beyond her innate understanding of herb and mineral, then she blended simple instinct with learned technique—a most powerful combination, far more powerful than any magician. And the title of White Healer was bestowed.

  I knew the makings of the Insight spell. Certainly not from Grandmama, who had no use for curiosity-soothing enchantments. Grandmama was not curious; “necessary knowledge” was all she wanted. I was not so calm—though I knew Lark thought me so. For Grandmama it was enough to be a Healer, but I wanted to be a White Healer. I wanted to learn magic.

  ’Twas not difficult to search out such knowledge. Market days brought any variety of mysticism mixed into gossip. Someone could be pointed to if you asked, or eagerness might draw someone to find you. Dame Gringer was a White Healer from the village of Crene who traded geese at market. She’d enjoyed my interest and had lent me metal-bound books of spells and potions, which I’d pored over in between barters. At the end of the day I’d return the books and ask a handful of questions. “You have potential,” the dame would always encourage.

  Herbs and minerals used for simple healing had much greater powers when combined with the proper spells. I learned that yew could be used to raise the dead, or, combined with minion and with proper crafting, yew could make the Insight spell. I learned as well that using such a spell could be life changing. Not even a year back Dame Gringer made the Insight spell because she’d wanted to learn why her son had abruptly left their village. Ever after she was mute and came no more to market. No one knew if this was brought on because of what she saw or the spell itself. Eowan Holt said she’d uttered a last word about breeders; he laughed that she was struck dumb for a gaggle of geese. But whatever the reason, it cut short my studies. Had Dame Gringer not gone silent, I might have learned how to use the yew to raise the dead.

  I might have saved Raif.

  Two days I lasted, arguing every reason why I should neither attempt something beyond my gift nor use up my remaining poison—my escape, as Harker said. But the answers to his portents were too great a temptation.

  Besides, every ingredient for the spell was at hand, and that seemed no coincidence.

  On the third day of my sojourn I undertook to cast the Insight spell. The preparations began at dawn—the importance of which Dame Gringer had impressed upon me above any actual casting. “Show that your intention is sincere,” she’d sc
ribbled in the margins of her books, “The rest will follow.” And so I woke at first light and carefully laid out all the mal stones that I’d gathered the day before in a wide circle on the lawn to create the neutral space, sweeping out any bits of pebble and twig and seed from the grass within. I milked the nanny goat and drank the first cupful with a handful of blackberries. Then I tethered the goats far from the circle with strands from the protective willow tree, so they could neither interrupt nor fall prey to the spell’s workings. I set a cinder stone, a hard stone, the yew, and minion just inside the circle and added the second cup of goat’s milk within as well. I took the last things from my satchel and laid them down: the lark feather and the leather ring. I felt some guilt to use them for this, but mementos made spells most powerful.

  I washed in the stream, then laid my cloak and frock and sandals to the side, wearing only the white undershift as a show of humility. I brushed my hands over my body to shed old energy. Then—with an earnest wish that I’d done well—I took a deep, shaky breath, picked up the branch I’d broken from the beech tree, and stepped inside the circle.

  With the beech I scraped a cross, quartering the circle. In one quarter I carved the word Shell; in the second, Lark; the third, See, defining the questions that I wanted answered. I did not ask to learn my weakness; the seer had already told me that. I kneeled in the remaining quarter.

  Minion first, I reminded myself. Minion shields Earth from yew. I opened the tiny vial of dried minion and divided it equally, mounding a tiny heap of minion over each of the three words. Then I picked up the vial of yew and poured all of it into my palm. I sorted equally the needles, bark, and wizened little drupes that still burned rich red in color. I saved three needles, three chips of bark, and three drupes, which I dropped into the goat’s milk. The rest of the yew was portioned atop the minion heaps.

  “Representations of intent,” I murmured; items to focus each answer. I pulled a strand of my hair and placed it on top of the Shell pile. ’Twas the weakest offering, since I had no idea what this shell was, but if I was meant to find it, then the answer would be within me. I placed the feather for Lark and put Raif’s woven leather ring on See.