Perhaps if I had tried, I could have done something to help my stepfather. Perhaps there could have been some other path than the one that led us to the base of the tree that grows in darkness. But the truth is that although I saw all these signs, I gave them little attention. Tellarin, my soldier, had begun to court me—at first only with glances and greetings, later with small gifts—and all else in my life shrank to insignificance by comparison.
In fact, so changed was everything that a newer, larger sun might have risen into the sky above the High Keep, warming every corner with its light. Even the most workaday tasks took fresh meaning because of my feelings for bright-eyed Tellarin. My catechisms and my reading lessons I now pursued diligently, so that my beloved might not find me lacking in conversation … except on those days when I could scarcely attend to them at all for dreaming about him. My walks in the castle grounds became excuses to look for him, to hope for a shared glance across a courtyard or down a hallway. Even the folktales Ulca told me over our stitchery, which before had been only a means to make the time pass pleasantly, now seemed completely new. The princes and princesses who fell in love were Tellarin and me. Their every moment of suffering burned me like fire, their ultimate triumphs thrilled me so deeply that some days I feared I might actually faint.
After a time, Ulca, who guessed but did not know, refused to tell me any tale that had kissing in it.
But I had my own story by then, and I was living it fully. My own first kiss came as we were walking in the sparse, windy garden that lay in the shadow of the Northmen’s tower. That ugly building was ever after beautiful to me, and even on the coldest of days, if I could see that tower, it would warm me.
“Your stepfather could have my head,” my soldier told me, his cheek touching lightly against mine. “I have betrayed both his trust and my station.”
“Then if you are a condemned man,” I whispered, “you may as well steal again.” And I pulled him back farther into the shadows and kissed him until my mouth was sore. I was alive in a way I had never been, and almost mad with it. I was hungry for him, for his kisses, his breath, the sound of his voice.
He gifted me with small things that could not be found in Lord Sulis’ drab and careful household—flowers, sweetmeats, small baubles he found at the markets in the new town of Erkynchester, outside the castle gates. I could hardly bring myself to eat the honeyed figs he bought for me, not because they were too rich for his purse, although they were—he was not wealthy like his friend Avalles—but because they were gifts from him, and thus precious. To do something as destructive as eat them seemed unimaginably wasteful.
“Eat them slowly, then,” he told me. “They will kiss your lips when I cannot.”
I gave myself to him, of course, completely and utterly. Ulca’s dark hints about soiled women drowning themselves in the Kingslake, about brides sent back to their families in disgrace, even about bastardy as the root of a dozen dreadful wars, were all ignored. I offered Tellarin my body as well as my heart. Who would not? And if I were that young girl once more, coming out of the shadows of her sorrowful childhood into that bright day, I would do it again, with equal joy. Even now that I see the foolishness, I cannot fault the girl I was. When you are young and your life stretches so far ahead of you, you are also without patience—you cannot understand that there will be other days, other times, other chances. God has made us this way. Who knows why He chose it so?
As for me, I knew nothing in those days but the fever in my blood. When Tellarin rapped at my door in the dark hours, I brought him to my bed. When he left me, I wept, but not from shame. He came to me again and again as autumn turned to winter, and as winter crept past we built a warm, secret world all our own. I could not imagine a life without him in it every moment.
Again, youth was foolish, for I have now managed to live without him for many years. There has even been much that was pleasing in my life since I lost him, although I would never have been able to believe such a thing then. But I do not think I have ever again lived as deeply, as truly, as in that first year of reckless discovery. It was as though I somehow knew that our time together would be short.
Whether it is called fate, or our weird, or the will of Heaven, I can look back now and see how each of us was set onto the track, how we were all made ready to travel in deep, dark places.
It was a night in late Feyever-month of that year when I began to realize that something more than simple distraction had overtaken my stepfather. I was reeling back down the corridor to my chamber—I had just kissed Tellarin farewell in the great hall, and was mad with the excitement of it—and I nearly stumbled into Lord Sulis. I was first startled, then terrified. My crime, I felt sure, must be as plain as blood on a white sheet. I waited trembling for him to denounce me. Instead he only blinked and held his candle higher.
“Breda?” he said. “What are you doing, girl?
He had not called me “girl” since before my mother died. His fringe of hair was astrew, as though he had just clambered from some assignation of his own, but if that was so, his stunned gaze suggested it had not been a pleasant one. His broad shoulders sagged, and he seemed so tired he could barely hold up his head. The man who had so impressed my mother on that first day in Godric’s hall had changed almost beyond recognizing.
My stepfather was wrapped in blankets, but his legs showed naked below the knee. Could this be the same Sulis, I wondered, who as long as I had known him had dressed each day with the same care as he had once used to set his lines of battle? The sight of his pale bare feet was unspeakably disturbing.
“I … I was restless and could not sleep, sire. I wished some air.”
His glance flicked across me and then began to rove the shadows again. He looked not just confused but actually frightened. “You should not be out of your chamber. It is late, and these corridors are full of …” He hesitated, then seemed to stop himself from saying something. “Full of draughts,” he said at last. “Full of cold air. Go on with you, girl.”
Everything about him made me uneasy. As I backed away, I felt compelled to say, “Good night, sire, and God bless you.”
He shook his head—it almost seemed a shudder—then turned and padded away.
A few days later the witch was brought to the High Keep in chains.
I only learned the woman had been brought to the castle when Tellarin told me. As we lay curled in my bed after lovemaking, he suddenly announced, “Lord Sulis has captured a witch.”
I was startled. Even with my small experience, I knew this was not the general run of pillow talk. “What do you mean?”
“She is a woman who lives in the Aldheorte forest,” he said, pronouncing the Erkylandish name with his usual charming clumsiness. “She comes often to the market in a town down the Ymstrecca, east of here. She is well known there—she makes herbal cures, I think, charms away warts, nonsense such as that. That is what Avalles said, anyway.”
I remembered the message that the once-whore Xanippa had bade me give my stepfather on the night my mother died. Despite the warm night, I pulled the blanket up over our damp bodies. “Why should Lord Sulis want her?” I asked.
Tellarin shook his head, unconcerned. “Because she is a witch, I suppose, and so she is against God. Avalles and some of the other soldiers arrested her and brought her in this evening.”
“But there are dozens of root peddlers and conjure-women in the town on the lakeshore where I grew up, and more living outside the castle walls. What does he want with her?”
“My lord does not think she is any old harmless conjure-woman,” Tellarin said. “He has put her in one of the deep cells underneath the throne room, with chains on her arms and legs.”
I had to see, of course, as much out of curiosity as out of worry about what seemed my stepfather’s growing madness.
In the morning, while Lord Sulis was still abed, I went down to the cells. The woman was the only prisoner—the deep cells were seldom used, since those kept in them were like
ly to die from the chill and damp before they had served a length of term instructive to others—and the guard on duty there was perfectly willing to let the stepdaughter of the castle’s master gawk at the witch. He pointed me to the last cell door in the underground chamber.
I had to stand on my toes to see through the barred slot in the door. The only light was a single torch burning on the wall behind me, so the witch was mostly hidden in shadows. She wore chains on wrists and ankles, just as Tellarin had said, and sat on the floor near the back of the windowless cell, her hunched shoulders giving her the shape of a rain-soaked hawk.
As I stared, the chains rattled ever so slightly, although she did not look up. “What do you want, little daughter?” Her voice was surprisingly deep.
“Lord … Lord Sulis is my stepfather,” I said at last, as if it explained something.
Her eyes snapped open, huge and yellow. I had already thought her shaped like a hunting bird—now I almost feared she would fly at me and tear me with sharp talons. “Do you come to plead his case?” she demanded. “I tell you the same thing I told him—there is no answer to his question. None that I can give, anyway.”
“What question?” I asked, hardly able to breathe.
The witch peered at me in silence for a moment, then clambered to her feet. I could see that it was a struggle for her to lift the chains. She shuffled forward until the light from the door slot fell on her squarely. Her dark hair was cut short as a man’s. She was neither pretty nor ugly, neither tall nor short, but there was a power about her, and especially in the unblinking yellow lamps of her eyes, that drew my gaze and held it. She was something I had not seen before and did not at all understand. She spoke like an ordinary woman, but she had wildness in her like the crack of distant thunder, like the flash of a deer in flight. I felt so helpless to turn away that I feared she had cast a spell upon me.
At last she shook her head. “I will not involve you in your father’s madness, child.”
“He is not my father. He married my mother.”
Her laugh was almost a bark. “I see.”
I moved uneasily from foot to foot, face still pressed against the bars. I did not know why I spoke to the woman at all, or what I wanted from her. “Why are you chained?”
“Because they fear me.”
“What is your name?” She frowned but said nothing, so I tried another. “Are you really a witch?”
She sighed. “Little daughter, go away. If you have nothing to do with your stepfather’s foolish ideas, then the best you can do is stay far from all this. It does not take a sorceress to see that it will not end happily.”
Her words frightened me, but I still could not pull myself away from the cell door. “Is there something you want? Food? Drink?”
She eyed me again, the large eyes almost fever-bright. “This is an even stranger household than I guessed. No, child. What I want is the open sky and my forest, but that is what I will not get from you or anyone. But your father says he has need of me—he will not starve me.”
The witch turned her back on me then and shuffled to the rear of the cell, dragging her chains across the stone. I climbed the stairs with my head full to aching—excited thoughts, sorrowful thoughts, frightened thoughts, all were mixed together and full of fluttering confusion, like birds in a sealed room.
My stepfather kept the witch prisoned as Marris-month turned into Avrel and the days of spring paced by. Whatever he wished from her, she would not give it. I visited her many times, but although she was kind enough in her way, she would speak to me only of meaningless things. Often she asked me to describe how the frost on the ground had looked that morning, or what birds were in the trees and what they sang, since in that deep, windowless cell carved into the stone of the headland, she could see and hear nothing of the world outside.
I do not know why I was so drawn to her. Somehow she seemed to hold the key to many mysteries—my stepfather’s madness, my mother’s sorrow, my own growing fears that the foundations beneath my new happiness were unsolid.
Although my stepfather did feed her, as she had promised he would, and did not allow her to be mistreated in anything beyond the fact of her imprisonment, the witch woman still grew markedly thinner by the day, and dark circles formed like bruises beneath her eyes. She was pining for freedom, and like a wild animal kept in a pen, she was sickening from her unhappiness. It hurt me to see her, as though my own liberty had been stolen. Each time I found her more drawn and weak than the time before, it brought back to me the agony and shame of my mother’s last, horrible days. Each time I left the cells, I went to a spot where I could be alone and I wept. Even my stolen hours with Tellarin could not ease the sadness I felt.
I would have hated my stepfather for what he was doing to her, but he too was growing more sickly with each day, as though he were trapped in some mirror version of her dank cell. Whatever the question was that she had spoken of, it plagued Sulis so terribly that he, a decent man, had stolen her freedom—so terribly that he scarcely slept in the nights at all, but sat up until dawn’s first light reading and writing and mumbling to himself in a kind of ecstasy. Whatever the question, I began to fear that both he and the witch would die because of it.
The one time that I worked up the courage to ask my stepfather why he had imprisoned her, he stared over my head at the sky, as though it had turned an entirely new color, and told me, “This place has too many doors, girl. You open one, then another, and you find yourself back where you began. I cannot find my way.”
If that was an answer, I could make no sense of it.
I offered the witch death and she gave me a prophecy in return.
The sentries on the wall of the Inner Bailey were calling the midnight watch when I arose. I had been in my bed for hours, but sleep had never once come near. I wrapped myself in my heaviest cloak and slipped into the hallway. I could hear my stepfather through his door, talking as though to a visitor. It hurt to hear his voice, because I knew he was alone.
At this hour, the only guard in the cells was a crippled old soldier who did not even stir in his sleep when I walked past him. The torch in the wall sconce had burned very low, and at first I could not see the witch’s shape in the shadows. I wanted to call to her, but I did not know what to say. The bulk of the great, sleeping castle seemed to press down on me.
At last the heavy chains clinked. “Is that you, little daughter?” Her voice was weary. After a while she stood and shuffled forward. Even in the faint light, she had a terrible, dying look. My hand stole to the purse that hung around my neck. I touched my golden Tree as I said a silent prayer, then felt the curve of that other thing, which I had carried with me since the night of my mother’s death. In a moment that seemed to have its own light, quite separate from the flickering glow of the torch, I pulled out the dragon’s claw and extended it to her through the bars.
The witch raised an eyebrow as she took it from me. She carefully turned it over in her palm, then smiled sadly. “A poisoned owl’s claw. Very appropriate. Is this for me to use on my captors? Or on myself?”
I shrugged helplessly. “You want to be free” was all I could say.
“Not with this, little daughter,” she said. “At least, not this time. As it happens, I have already surrendered—or, rather, I have bargained. I have agreed to give your stepfather what he thinks he wants in exchange for my freedom. I must see and feel the sky again.” Gently, she handed me back the claw.
I stared at her, almost sick with the need to know things. “Why won’t you tell me your name?”
Another sad smile. “Because my true name I give to no one. Because any other name would be a lie.”
“Tell me a lie, then.”
“A strange household, indeed! Very well. The people of the north call me Valada.”
I tried it on my tongue. “Valada. He will set you free now?”
“Soon, if the bargain is honored on both sides.”
“What is it, this bargain?”
> “A bad one for everyone.” She saw my look. “You do not want to know, truly. Someone will die because of this madness—I see it as clearly as I see your face peering through the door.”
My heart was a piece of cold stone in my breast. “Someone will die? Who?”
Her expression became weary, and I could see that standing with the weight of her shackles was an effort for her. “I do not know. And in my weariness, I have already told you too much, little daughter. These are not matters for you.”
I was dismissed, even more miserable and confused. The witch would be free, but someone else would die. I could not doubt her word—no one could, who had seen her fierce, sad eyes as she spoke. As I walked back to my bedchamber, the halls of the Inner Bailey seemed a place entirely new, a strange and unfamiliar world.
My feelings for Tellarin were still astonishingly strong, but in the days after the witch’s foretelling I was so beset with unhappiness that our love was more like a fire that made a cold room habitable than a sun which warmed everything, as it had been. If my soldier had not had worries of his own, he would certainly have noticed.
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