Sisters of the Fire

by Kim Wilkins

  Skalmir came to stand beside her. ‘Did you see something?’

  ‘There was a woman here … she said she was washing the clothes of the soon-dead. My father’s clothes.’

  They stood together a few moments, both tensed, as if waiting for the woman to return.

  ‘I don’t suppose she told you where we are?’ he asked.

  ‘She wouldn’t say,’ Rose replied. ‘I’m afraid for my father now.’

  ‘I wouldn’t trust anything a ghost said,’ he said with a reassuring smile. ‘Put it out of your mind.’

  But the thought stayed in there, along with all the other shadows.

  It was a sunny, blustery afternoon when Ivy took the boys out into the garden for fresh air and space. Hilla had been unwell, and so they had been climbing over Ivy all day, demanding she play with them and tell them stories and Ivy was weary to her marrow. At least outside, with the yellow light and the salty air, she didn’t feel so oppressed.

  Ivy sat on the garden bench and watched as the boys spun themselves in dizzy circles, jumped on each other’s afternoon shadows, chased ladybirds, and wheeled around pretending to be seagulls. She turned her face to the breeze and closed her eyes. Being a mother after so many days engaged in politics – oh, how clueless she was about everything: where Guthmer earned his money; how it flowed to services in the city; how many people had loathed him for his taxes – felt at once terribly easy and terribly hard. Easy, because all she had to do was love the boys and occasionally tell them off for suffocating her with their endless demands and sticky fingers; but terribly hard because it was so unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Whether or not she wiped Edmund’s face made no difference to whether kingdoms rose and fell, and that made it seem almost pointless.

  A shadow fell over her and she presumed it was one of the boys, was about to say, ‘What now?’ when she opened her eyes and saw Elgith standing in front of her. The woman’s threadbare brown cloak was drawn up over her head, throwing her face into shadow.

  Ivy narrowed her eyes in a way that she hoped looked menacing. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘To talk.’

  ‘Who let you through the gates? I left strict orders about who can come and go from the family compound.’

  ‘Everybody knows me, Ivy. I have worked for Guthmer since I was a young woman.’

  ‘If you want to talk, you apply for an appointment through my captain like everyone else does,’ Ivy said. ‘You may go now.’

  But Elgith didn’t go. She sat down, and Ivy was at once both outraged and terrified by her boldness.

  ‘What do you mean by this?’

  ‘I cannot stand by and say nothing. Guthmer would approve of nothing you’ve done.’

  ‘Like what? Closing the chapels? He was the most reluctant trimartyr ever converted! Saving the city for his boys rather than portioning it off to his jealous and ungrateful relatives? I think not.’

  ‘He would have had his cousin take over until Eadric was of an age to become duke of Sæcaster.’

  ‘Well then he should have told me rather than his lover,’ Ivy snarled.

  ‘Perhaps he told me so that I would pass it on. Perhaps he didn’t trust you to do so.’

  ‘And have you passed it on?’

  ‘I will.’

  Ivy stared at her.

  ‘Unless …’

  ‘Ah, so this is blackmail?’

  ‘If it were blackmail I would ask for riches,’ Elgith said. ‘I simply want my old station returned to me. To be housekeeper again, here at the duke’s residence.’

  Ivy was immediately suspicious. ‘Why would you want that? To spy on me? To turn my staff or my boys against me? For petty revenge?’

  Elgith’s eyes darted away, and Ivy knew she had hit upon the truth.

  ‘Oh, you can’t bear it, can you? That he loved you but wouldn’t marry you? Elgith, you were too low born for him to marry. He married me because my father is Æthlric of Ælmesse. Who was your father? A pig farmer? A peat cutter? Did he come home covered in mud and shit every day?’ Ivy could tell from Elgith’s expression that again she had landed very close to the mark. ‘No, you cannot have your position back. I want you nowhere near me. Go to his cousin for all I care. I have an army on my side, you understand. Men who are willing to fight and die for me. That is what it means to be the daughter of a king, the wife of a duke. But you, you are no-one. The day you can raise an army, then you might be able to threaten me.’ Ivy’s heart was beating hard after this tirade, but it felt good to have said it. She noticed the boys had stopped playing and were hanging back near the garden beds, watching her curiously.

  ‘Come along, boys,’ Ivy said, standing and motioning to them. ‘We are going inside. The weather has turned unpleasant out here.’

  And in the seconds before they arrived under her wings, Elgith stood and leaned close, and said directly into Ivy’s ear, ‘I know what you did to Guthmer, and when I have proof you will lose it all.’

  Ivy’s heart froze over. Elgith strode off, her cloak flapping behind her in the wind, the hood blowing back to reveal her grey hair. She didn’t look frightening, she looked aged and uncertain and Ivy tried to comfort herself with that image of her. Just a silly old woman nobody would listen to.

  I know what you did to Guthmer.

  Did she? No, perhaps she suspected, but if she’d known she would have told Guthmer while he was still alive, surely? Or did she try to tell him and he dismissed her, so deceived was he by Ivy’s feigned adoration?

  When I have proof you will lose it all.

  But there was no proof. All of the soup bowls were cleaned, Guthmer’s body was deep in the ground.

  Dritta still lived, though. The wise old herbalist who sold Ivy all her potions. Perhaps Ivy would have to pay her a visit, and buy some silence too.

  Ivy paced the hall tower, her hip bumping the corner of the large table every time she passed it. She would have a bruise there next time she undressed. The lamps were lit but the room still felt small and dark, the stone flags cold under her feet. The wind had whipped up strongly and was howling over the roof and rattling the shutter on the single window that looked down to the harbour. Ivy felt she had been waiting for hours. As the shadows of the evening grew longer, so did Ivy’s fears.

  Finally, she heard footsteps on the stairs and the door opened. Crispin was there.

  ‘My lady,’ he said. ‘You sent for me?’

  ‘What took so long?’ she asked, going to him, grasping his hand.

  ‘I came straight here,’ he said, with a slight note of irritation in her voice that made her flinch.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m just …’

  ‘What is wrong, my love?’ he said, pulling out a seat and helping her into it. He crouched before her. ‘You are pale and shaking.’

  ‘Elgith threatened me,’ Ivy said.

  ‘Who is Elgith?’

  ‘Guthmer’s old housekeeper. Also his lover.’

  ‘Ivy, take a deep breath. She’s seventy. How could she hurt you?’

  Ivy couldn’t tell him the truth about what she had done to Guthmer; couldn’t bear for his opinion of her to be brought so low. ‘She says she will go to Guthmer’s cousin and tell him that Guthmer had wanted him to take over Sæcaster. She says she will tell any lie necessary, including that I am fucking the captain of the guard, that the children aren’t even Guthmer’s.’ She managed to work herself up to a hysterical pitch with these wild imaginings – anything to make Crispin feel the urgent press upon his heart that she felt upon hers.

  ‘Sh, sh,’ he said softly, soothingly, stroking her hand. ‘Look me in the eye …’ She did so. ‘Good, now calm down. You’ve let your silly imagination run away with you.’

  But he didn’t know, he didn’t know how bad it really was, so she said, ‘I’m still afraid.’

  ‘Of course you are. Of course you are, my love.’ He ran his hand over his neatly trimmed beard. ‘I will take care of this. All of it.’


  ‘You will? How?’

  ‘You go back to your bed. Go and be with your boys. Not a word of Elgith’s will leave the city. And no foul rumours about our relationship will take us down. I promise you. Silence will follow my actions.’

  But Ivy wouldn’t settle. She shot out of her chair and paced again. ‘She hates me. She hates me and she won’t stop trying to take her revenge on me for marrying the man she loved.’

  ‘She will stop.’

  ‘How? How will you make her stop?’

  He fell silent and she turned. He was very still, gazing at her, dark curls catching the lamplight. She knew then what he intended.

  ‘I will make her stop,’ he said at length. ‘I will make it all stop. I will manage all the risks.’

  But he was waiting. He was waiting for a signal from her, a word of approval, of permission.

  Ivy nodded.

  Crispin offered her a tight smile, then turned and left. The door banged shut behind him. The wind howled overhead and Ivy sat, head in her hands, and tried to stop herself trembling.

  Ivy woke deep in the night, a shock to her heart. She listened hard into the dark, wondering what had woken her. Slowly her pulse returned to normal. Perhaps she had dreamed something dark, that had fled the moment she opened her eyes. She wondered where Crispin was, and then wondered whether Elgith was dead by now.

  Of course she was. Ivy knew the old woman’s death was the thing that had startled her awake. Her own guilty intentions had circled back on her like ravens coming to roost. Elgith was dead; Crispin had made sure of it.

  Sleep didn’t return.

  Ivy went to the stables early the next morning, before the boys were awake and demanding food. Hilla would simply have to be better today. She called out to Joe, but he was nowhere to be seen. She checked the little room off the stable where he slept, but his bed was empty. Ivy supposed she would have to saddle her own horse.

  She went through the motions, expecting Joe to turn up, apologising and bumbling in his friendly way, but he didn’t. Ivy mounted the horse and pulled her hood up high. She swept down and away from the duke’s compound, then out onto the road around the outskirts of the city, and from there down towards the winding road, five miles along, that took her to the Tanglewood.

  She knew the way from here well. Too well. She’d visited Dritta for the first time after she’d had Edmund, for a sea-sponge soaked in herbs that she’d popped up her woobly to prevent another pregnancy. Unfortunately, the damned thing had made her itch so much that she’d nearly torn herself in half, so back she’d gone to have it fished out, and to be told that surely her husband couldn’t find the mark that often with arrows so bent by age.

  How wrong Dritta had been. Luckily, the old woman was also an expert at abortion potions and luckily, too, she had never blinked when Ivy had asked for something to poison the rats in the stable, something mild that wouldn’t do more than make a man sick if he were to take a single dose by accident. ‘More than a single dose, though,’ Dritta had said, when handing her the little jar with the rat poison in it, ‘could make a man very sick over time. Especially if he were old.’

  Truth be told, Ivy wasn’t sure what Dritta suspected about her repeat business. She dispensed her herbals and took Ivy’s money and never thought to offer advice or ask for favours. Here in the little house in the woods, Dritta was hidden away from the trimartyr nonsense that went on in Sæcaster, and Ivy understood that she did a brisk business from city girls in trouble, or who wanted to stay out of it in the first place.

  Take the narrow road after the dead oak, then down the gully and over the stream, past the rock that looked like a bear and … there it was. The little limewashed house. Ivy dismounted and tied her horse to a tree and, keeping her hood close about her face, knocked on the door.

  Dritta always took forever to open her door, as though she lived on different time measurements from everyone else. Ivy tapped her foot impatiently. She was nervous, jumpy. Was Elgith already dead? And what was worse, the idea of her still being alive and wanting to have revenge, or her being dead at Ivy’s command? The morning air in the wood was damp and cool, the inescapable smell of salt on it even this far from the sea.

  Finally, the door opened, and Dritta smiled and gestured her in. ‘My lady Ivy,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ Ivy said. ‘Never again. I am never coming again and you need to forget you ever saw me here today or any other day.’

  Dritta nodded with a slight smile, her long silver hair being picked up gently by the breeze. ‘I forget all my ladies the instant they are gone, whether they be duchesses or whores.’

  ‘I need you to forget harder than you ever have before. No matter what happens or who comes knocking.’ Ivy reached under her cloak and brought out the garnet-and-gold brooch that Guthmer had nearly been buried with. ‘This is to buy you a forgetting potion.’

  Dritta reached for it tentatively, stared at in wonder.

  ‘Do we have an understanding?’ Ivy asked.

  ‘Yes, we do,’ the old woman said.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ivy said, and she meant it. ‘Thank you for everything.’

  ‘Take care of yourself, little one,’ Dritta said, as Ivy turned to her horse. ‘Hard roads call for hard feet. Yours may be too soft.’

  ‘I will be fine,’ Ivy muttered, untying her horse. Without a glance back, she galloped towards home.

  Down near the docks she saw a commotion, people gathered, and thought nothing more of it until she was riding back through the city. Two men and a crying woman, bent with age, were carrying an empty stretcher to the sea.

  ‘What is it?’ Ivy asked. ‘Is somebody ill?’

  ‘They’ve found a body in the water this morning, my lady,’ one of the men said.

  Elgith. It must be. But then the man hooked a thumb towards the crying woman. ‘It was her grandson.’

  He was barely audible over the old woman’s sobs. ‘My boy!’ she cried. ‘My boy! My Joe!’

  Joe. The woman was Joe’s grandmother, who Ivy knew had raised him when his own mother died. She could do nothing but watch as the trio hurried off. Stiff in her saddle, the one that Joe always cleaned so cursorily, waves of cold crashed over her. Joe had known about Crispin and Ivy. Now Joe was dead.

  No foul rumours about our relationship will take us down.

  She thought about Joe’s face. His sweet smile. His endearing bumbling.

  I will make it all stop. I will manage all the risks.

  She’d known he would silence Elgith, but what other horrors had Crispin committed in her name? Ivy urged her horse forwards and returned to the unmanned stable.

  They stayed by the fire that afternoon. Skalmir was finding it more and more difficult to know how to help Rose, who was frightened and pale most of the time, jumpy, superstitious. He hadn’t seen the ghost of the washerwoman, but the encounter had got under Rose’s skin. All afternoon, she watched the place by the stream where she said the washerwoman had hung out the clothes, gnawing on her fingernails and softly clearing her throat. Clouds had come over her eyes. Again, he had the uncanny feeling that he was looking at Rowan, grown, and it sparked his protective instincts.

  They didn’t speak, and even when the sky began to grow dim she sat there still. He was about to suggest they eat something when there was a loud rustle in the leaves a little further into the dark wood, then confident footfalls.

  Rose sat up straight. Skalmir tensed, listening.

  ‘A person?’ she asked.

  ‘Four footed,’ he said, and thought of wolves, though they were usually softer on their feet, more cautious and canny.

  The footfalls grew faster. Skalmir stood and grasped Rose’s hand to pull her to her feet, his blood sounding an alarm. ‘Run,’ he said, just as an enormous black hound burst from cover and leapt towards them.

  They ran, Skalmir dragging Rose by the hand, leaving their camp with their food and their packs and their fire behind. Rose shrieked as the monstrous dog snapped at their heel
s. Skalmir kept his head up, searching in the early evening gloom for just the right tree to climb to escape it. They were being driven into thinning woodland. He could see a mass of sky, the corner of the moon, then a huge ash tree came into view in the centre of it all. Some of its mighty branches reached nearly all the way to the ground.

  ‘Rose, the tree,’ he said, redoubling his speed as the dog barked and snarled.

  He propelled her ahead of him, and she climbed up onto a low branch and then from there scaled her way up and up, to sit in a fork high above the ground. He followed. The dog easily reached the lower branch and took a bite out of his foot, piercing through his shoe leather. Skalmir pulled his foot free of his shoe, and climbed up next to Rose. The dog mauled the shoe, then stretched its huge paws up on the tree and barked and barked, slavered and sniffed, but could not reach them.

  Skalmir had never seen anything like it. Even Bluebell’s war dog was less than half the size of this thing. Its gigantic black head was like a boulder, and its eyes shone an uncanny red like embers. Rose shivered on the branch next to him, clinging to the trunk with white fingers.

  ‘We are too high up for it,’ he said soothingly, a finger pressed against his lip to quiet her. ‘It will eventually go.’

  Eventually. After a few more minutes of barking, the dog curled up at the base of the tree, scratched itself for a time, then went to sleep. Skalmir’s foot stung where the dog’s tooth had ripped a jagged wound in it. Rose tore a strip of material from the hem of her dress and bound it for him.

  ‘I am afraid it will never leave,’ Rose said.

  He opened his mouth to say something reassuring, but the words, ‘Perhaps it never will,’ came out. He clamped his mouth shut, shook his head as though addled.

  ‘What? Do you really think not?’

  ‘No, I –’

  ‘I don’t know if you’re cruel and I oughtn’t trust you.’ This time it was Rose’s turn to press her hands over her lips. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I said that.’